In Virginia, a military stronghold becomes a haven for Afghan refugees
FREDERICKSBURG, Va. (AP) — Kat Renfroe was at Mass when she saw a volunteer opportunity in the bulletin. Her Catholic parish was looking for tutors for Afghan youth, newly arrived in the United States.
There was a personal connection for Renfroe. Her husband, now retired from the Marine Corps, had deployed to Afghanistan four times. 'He just never talked about any other region the way he did about the people there,' she said.
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Winnipeg Free Press
27 minutes ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
`This House' makes world premiere, exploring Black history through a family's legacy in Harlem
ST. LOUIS (AP) — Near the end of 'This House,' a heart-wrenching opera given its world premiere last weekend, the matriarch Ida poignantly intones messages to her family on stage and to the audience. 'History's the only thing to survive,' soprano Adrienne Danrich sings before adding: 'You may have left us, but we will never leave you.' A rumination on love, aspiration, coping and the unyielding weight of the past, the roughly two-hour work that opened Saturday night at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis mixes the living and ghosts ambiguously in a Harlem brownstone. Ricky Ian Gordon's lush score brings to vivid life a libretto by Lynn Nottage and her daughter Ruby Aiyo Gerber, weaving impacts of the Civil War, Great Migration, Black Power movement, AIDS crisis and gentrification. There are five more performances through June 29. 'I just wanted to be able to tell all of these really important moments in Black history,' Gerber said, 'but as they relate to one family up into the current moment, so that there is not this erasure as if the past was the past, which I think increasingly now, especially as we see more and more censorship of Black history, is kind of this pervasive narrative.' Writing began when Gerber was a college senior Now 27, Gerber started 'This House' as a play in 2020 during her senior year at Brown while the coronavirus pandemic unfolded. Her mother, the only woman to win a pair of Pulitzer Prizes for drama, for 'Ruined' and 'Sweat, ' suggested Gerber adapt it with her into an opera composed by Gordon, Nottage's partner on 'Intimate Apparel' at Lincoln Center Theater. Opera Theater of St. Louis commissioned 'This House' for its 50th anniversary festival season as its 45th world premiere. 'Equal parts a family drama, a ghost story and a meditation on inheritance and memory,' company general director Andrew Jorgensen said. Ideas were exchanged when Gordon, Nottage and Gerber met at a Providence, Rhode Island, hotel. Among the changes, an escapist duet the librettists centered around Barcelona was changed to Valencia so as not to be similar to Stephen Sondheim's 'Company.' 'Being a mother-daughter you can be so honest,' Gerber said, recalling her mom telling her of one flowery passage: 'That's corny and I don't think it works.' Nottage still lives in the Brooklyn parlor house where Gerber grew up. 'We have different muscles. I'm someone that comes from the playwriting world,' Nottage said. 'Ruby's comfort zone is really poetry and language. and so I thought that between the two of us, we could divide and conquer in some ways.' Opera is set in Harlem brownstone In the resulting story, a house at 336 Convent Ave. was bought in 1919 by Minus Walker, a sharecropper's son. Zoe, a present-day investment banker (soprano Briana Hunter), and husband Glenn (tenor Brad Bickhardt) mull whether to move back to the house and subdivide the property. Zoe's brother, poetic painter Lindon (baritone Justin Austin), doesn't want to leave the house. and his lover Thomas (bass-baritone Christian Pursell) suggests they travel to Spain. Hunter tapped into anxiety, fear, pain and grief to portray Zoe. 'She's an ambitious woman, and she has been through a lot of really horrible, traumatic events through her family,' Hunter said. 'I understand the desire to kind of escape that. She's kind of a classic case of you can't avoid things forever.' Eight of the 10 characters are Black. There's a love triangle, pregnancies and surprise deaths. The house itself sings in 12-tone chords. Ida's Uncle Percy (tenor Victor Ryan Robertson) is a numbers runner who jolts the first act with an aria 'Drink Up!' 'Sportin' Life on steroids,' Gordon said, referring to the dope dealer in 'The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess.' 'We all are haunted by our past, and we all are haunted by our ghosts,' Gordon said. 'The question of living one's life is how does one reconcile the past and go on? How do you move into a future unbridled and free enough to be liberated and not imprisoned by the past?' Conductor has a penchant for contemporary works Daniela Candillari led her third world premiere in less than two years after Jeanine Tesori's 'Grounded' at the Washington National Opera and Rene Orth's '10 Days in a Madhouse' at Opera Philadelphia. Gordon originally envisioned the orchestra as chamber sized to hold down expenses, but Candillari pushed to add instruments. Conducting this is different from leading Verdi or Puccini. 'You can have two conductors read the score in a very different way,' she said. 'Having that direct source. a living composer who can tell you: This is what I heard and this is how I meant it and this is what this needs to be, that's incredibly invaluable.' Forty-eight players from the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra were in the deep pit at the Loretto-Hilton Center for the Performing Arts, a venue with a thrust stage and difficult acoustics. James Robinson, the company's former artistic director, returned to direct the performances and is likely to bring the staging to Seattle Opera, where he became general and artistic director in September 2024. 'It is kind of a ghost story, and I think that's the most important thing, knowing that we're able to bounce back and forth between time periods efficiently,' he said. For Danrich, portraying Ida has a special resonance. She is a St. Louis native and is staying at a hotel three blocks from where she grew up. 'My cousins, my grandmother, my grandfather, me, my sisters, we all lived in that big old house and we called it the big house,' she said. 'I was like, yep, this is my house. I'm actually basing her movements and her mannerisms off of my mother.'
Winnipeg Free Press
an hour ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
French Open: Musetti kicks a ball that hits a line judge and is cited for unsportsmanlike conduct
PARIS (AP) — Lorenzo Musetti was warned for unsportsmanlike conduct for kicking a tennis ball that inadvertently hit a linesperson during his French Open quarterfinal against Frances Tiafoe on Tuesday. Unlike most top-level tennis tournaments, which rely on electronic line-calling, there are still humans on court at Roland-Garros to make rulings on whether shots land in or out. The eighth-seeded Musetti, who won a bronze medal for Italy at the Paris Olympics and was a semifinalist at Wimbledon last year, had just dropped a game to trail Tiafoe 5-3 in the second set of their match at Court Philippe-Chatrier. As Musetti was given balls so he could serve in the next game, he took a left-footed swipe at one and it flew into a female line judge making calls behind his baseline. The chair umpire immediately announced to the crowd that Musetti was being given a warning for a code violation. There is no penalty for an initial warning of that sort. Soon, Tiafoe claimed that set. Musetti had taken the opener in the best-of-five-set match with a semifinal berth at stake. Neither of them has been to the final four at Roland-Garros. Thursdays Keep up to date on sports with Mike McIntyre's weekly newsletter. ___ AP tennis:
Toronto Star
an hour ago
- Toronto Star
Former top Greek fire officials convicted over deadly blaze, victims' relatives angry at acquittals
ATHENS, Greece (AP) — A court in Athens on Tuesday convicted a former Fire Service chief and nine others for their roles in managing a 2018 wildfire that killed more than 100 people outside the Greek capital.
