Upcoming and Noteworthy

Almost four decades after it was written, Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama "A Soldier's Play" has made it to Broadway. This week on In a Broadway Minute, theater critic Howard Shapiro reviews the Roundabout Theater production, Friday (1/24) at 8 am and Saturday (1/25) at 10 am.

An opera that has been dubbed "the night of the seven stars” will fill  this week’s Sunday Opera (1/26 3:00 p.m.) with Giacomo Meyerbeer’s 1836 marathon of an opera, “Les Huguenots.”  Set in France in the tumultuous times around the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre where the French Protestants were set-upon and murdered by the French Catholics, this grandest of all grand operas has a love story at its center focusing on Valantine, a Catholic girl who renounces her faith in order to be with the Protestant man she loves, and her beloved Raoul.  The final frenzy features a mob killing a church full of women and children, and Valantin’s father killing Raoul and his daughter in a finale that is reminiscent of Halavy’s “La Juive.”  

We’re marching into February on this week’s Dress Circle (1/26 7:00 p.m.) with marches from Broadway and Hollywood.  Now, not every march is self-proclaimed as such, so we’ve looked those songs that will hopefully make you want to get up, grab a baton, and strut around the room.  Along with “Seventy-Six Trombones” from “The Music Man,” “I Ain’t Down Yet” from “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” “Follow the Fold” from “Guys and Dolls,” and “Hey, Look Me Over,” from “Wildcat,” we’ll also be looking to musicals like “Jupiter’s Darling,” “Oliver!”, and “Hello, Dolly!”.  

Laura Linney is starring on Broadway in the one-woman play "My Name is Lucy Barton," adapted for the stage by the author of the popular book with the same title. Theater critic Howard Shapiro this week reviews the play on In a Broadway Minute, Friday (12/17) at 8 am and Saturday (12/18) at 10 am.

There are two lesser-known works by Kurt Weill on this week’s Sunday Opera (1/19 3:00 p.m.) with a performance of his final opera in Germany before his emigration and an excerpt from the first piece he wrote in France on his way to the United States.  With a plot that is far too complicated to go into, “Die Burgschaft” or “The Pedge” is said to be about the “rise to power of a money driven dictatorship, paralleling the rise of the Nazis.”  It is also a parable regarding man’s role in society.  It was premiered in Berlin in 1932 and was popular until banned by the Nazi regime.  The recording to which we’ll be listening comes from the Spoleto Festival and is conducted by Julius Rudel.  

We’re once again going to the Dickens on this week’s Dress Circle (1/19 7:00 p.m.) in the second part of our series looking at musicals based on the works of one of the world’s most beloved authors.  Without an orphan or miser in sight, we’ll be sampling songs from “Pickwick,” a musicalization of Dickens’ first novel “The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club,” which starred Harry Secombe.  We’re returning to Rupert Holmes’ “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” but this time, we’ll listen to several songs from the recent Broadway revival.    

Toquato Tasso’s poem “Jerusalem Delivered” has been used as the basis for many classical pieces, most notably the operas “Armida” by Rossini and “Rinaldo” by Handel.  On this week’s Sunday Opera (1/12 3:00 p.m.), we’ll turn to a less familiar treatment in Joseph Haydn’s forgotten operatic version also entitled “Armida.”  In this recording made in 1978, Jessye Norma portrays the sorceress of the title who is sent by “The Dark One” to defeat the Crusaders who are attempting to take Jerusalem back from the Saracens by causing them to fall in love with her before she kills them.  The leader of the knights, Rinaldo (Claes H. Ahnsjo). falls in love with Armida, and, much to her horror, Armida reciprocates culminating in a tragic ending for Rinaldo.  Also included in this cast are Norma Burrowes as Zelmira, Armida’s accomplice, Samuel Ramey as Idreno, the king of the Saracens, and Robin Leggate and Anthony Rolfe Johnson as two other knights, Ublado and Clotarco.  Antal Dorati is the conductor of this performance featuring the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne.  

It’s finally happened (not that it hasn’t happened before), but on this week’s Dress Circle (1/12 7:00 p.m.), we’re going to the Dickens – literally.  Charles Dickens has long been a favorite author of ours and of others too, obviously because there have been many stage and musical adaptations of his works with varying degrees of success.  This week in “part the first,” we’ll be looking at musical version of “Cricket on the Hearth,” “Great Expectations,” “Hard Times,” and “The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”  

There have been some eighteen operas based on the legend of Faust, and on this week’s Sunday Opera (1/5 3:00 p.m.), we’ll hear one of the many lesser-known versions in Louis Spohr’s 1816 version.  The libretto by Josef Karl Bernard is based on the original legend and was not influenced by Goethe’s treatment.  In this version, Faust (Bo Skovhus) has two loves, the maiden Roschen (Brigitte Wohlfarth) whom he throws over for Kunigunde (Hillevi Martinpelto).  He gives Kunigunde a love potion created by the witch Sycorax (Martina Borst) on her wedding day, and Kunigunde’s attention to Faust causes Count Hugo (Robert Swensen), her betrothed, to challenge Faust to a duel.  With the help of Mephistopheles (Franz Hawlata), the Count is killed, Kunigunde goes mad, and Roschen drowns herself.  

We’re welcoming in a new month and new year on this week’s Dress Circle (1/5 7:00 p.m.) with songs from a specific group of shows that opened in January: the seventeen shows that had the longest runs although we’ll still be covering some 69 years of Broadway history.  Beginning with the longest running January show, “Phantom of the Opera” which has run over 13,518 performances, we’ll be including shows such as “Hello, Dolly!”, “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” “The Wiz,” “Fosse,” “Shenandoah,” “Ragtime,” “Olvier!”, “The Little Mermaid,” and end with 1945’s “Up in Central Park.”