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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for June 7, 2008

TT: Gérard Mortier’s gamble

June 7, 2008 by Terry Teachout

254755.JPGGérard Mortier, the New York City Opera‘s incoming general manager and artistic director, is closing the New York State Theater down next season for much-needed remodeling. As a result, the company will not perform staged opera again until the fall of 2009, when Mortier’s first season will consist of six twentieth-century operas, Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Leos Janacek’s The Makropulos Case, Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice, Olivier Messiaen’s St. Francis of Assisi, and Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach. Rarely in the history of American opera has the director of a company taken a bigger pair of chances.
Is City Opera’s new boss visionary or crazy–or both? I’m not sure I can answer that one just yet, but I’ll be taking a preliminary stab at the question in my next “Sightings” column, which appears in the “Weekend Journal” section of today’s Wall Street Journal. Pick up a copy this morning and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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