Archives for October 10, 2019

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review an important New York opening, the Irish Repertory Theatre’s off-Broadway revival of Conor McPherson’s Dublin Carol. Here’s an excerpt.

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Conor McPherson, like so many Irish playwrights, has a knack for writing complex, involving dramatic monologues, as well as a taste for dark tales in which alcohol and its misuses figure prominently. Put these inclinations together and you get “Dublin Carol,” a seasonally themed three-hander (it takes place, like Mr. McPherson’s “The Seafarer,” on Christmas Eve) in which most of the talking is done by a middle-aged mortician’s assistant with a weakness for booze whose life has come to naught.

First performed in 2000 at London’s Royal Court Theatre, “Dublin Carol” has had two major U.S. stagings to date, at New York’s Atlantic Theater Company in 2003 and Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 2008. Now, though, it has come home (so to speak) to the Irish Repertory Theatre, whose matchlessly intimate 148-seat mainstage auditorium is the best of all possible spaces in which to watch great performances up close. Jeffrey Bean, supported by Cillian Hegarty and Sarah Street and directed by Ciarán O’Reilly with his usual discreet self-assurance, is giving such a performance…

Mr. Bean tells his tale with the shattered dignity of a man who is clinging to the walls of an abyss. The fact that you are so physically close to the stage permits him to perform in so soft-spoken a way that the impact of his description of what it feels like to be a drunk sneaks up on you, then explodes in your face…

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for Dublin Carol:

In this week’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, which appears in the online edition of today’s paper, I discuss the case of Plácido Domingo. Here’s an excerpt.

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The moving finger of #MeToo is pointed straight at Plácido Domingo. That’s big news, not least because he is more than just a legendary opera singer. Mr. Domingo is also a conductor and powerful arts administrator who ran the Washington National Opera from 1996 to 2011 and has been the general director of L.A. Opera since 2003. His is by far the best-known living name in the opera world—a name that is now besmirched by scandal….

To be sure, the doors of most of Europe’s opera companies remain open to Mr. Domingo, for many Europeans regard the #MeToo movement as a manifestation of American sexual puritanism. The Spanish mezzo-soprano Maria José Suarez, who has sung with Mr. Domingo, described him to Cadena SER, a Spanish news-radio station, as “a man who loves women, like I love men, and that is not a problem.” (Anyone who doubts that her attitude is widely shared need only recall that Woody Allen and Roman Polanski continue to be adulated in Europe.)  Be that as it may, it it clear that Mr. Domingo’s U.S. performing career is effectively over.

Given the detrimental effects of the allegations against Mr. Domingo on the institutions where he has worked, it’s time for the opera world to give some thought to how crises like this can be better managed….

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Read the whole thing here.