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The Independent
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Nero's ancient Rome and Jazz Age New York meet in `The Comet/Poppea' at Lincoln Center
Nero's ancient Rome and Jazz Age New York were similar. That is the message of 'The Comet/Poppea,' an intriguing combination of Monteverdi's 1643 opera 'L'incoronazione di Poppea' and George E. Lewis' 'The Comet,' a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year. The mashup conceived by director Yuval Sharon began a five-performance run at Lincoln Center's Summer for the City on Wednesday night. First seen in Los Angeles last year, the American Modern Opera Company production unfolds on a turntable that completes a spin each 2 minutes, 8 seconds. An audience of 380 is split into sections on opposite sides of the set on stage at the David Koch Theater while the venue's 2,586 auditorium seats remain empty. 'It's an unstable ride over the course of 90 minutes, and the power of the interpretation is up to each and every spectator,' Sharon said. 'Whether you're on one side of the seating bank or the other, you're going to have a totally different experience and you may miss a really important piece of action that your imagination is going to have to fill.' In Monteverdi's final opera, created to Giovanni Francesco Busenello's libretto, Nerone exiles his wife Ottavia, leaving him free to crown Poppea empress. Lewis composed 'The Comet' to librettist Douglas Kearney's adaption of W.E.B. Du Bois' dystopian eight-page 1920 short story in which a working-class Black man, Jim (Davóne Tines), and a society white woman, Julia (Kiera Duffy), believe they are the only survivors of a comet and can join to form a prejudice-free society. Their aspirations collapse when they learn people outside New York remained alive and segregation was unconquerable. 'People can make the leap between the music they're hearing and the kinds of tensions that are inherent to modern life and the tensions that the opera presents and the text presents, particularly around the dystopian aspect of white supremacy,' Lewis said. 'White supremacy is a kind of dystopia and it's a dystopia that we continue to live with today." Different styles for different eras Mimi Lien's two-sided set, illuminated strikingly by John Torres, is tiered with a bath at the top level on the Roman portion and a red Art Deco restaurant evoking the Rainbow Room on the other, where Jim and Julia find three dead bodies slumped. 'Jim is confronted with what it means to be the only man left alive, what it newly means to be a Black man allowed into spaces he wasn't before, but then have that dream crushed by the reality of Julia also inhabiting that space," said Tines, a commanding presence as Jim and the smaller role of Mercury. 'The Comet/Poppea' debuted at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA last June and also was performed with a student cast in Philadelphia in November. It is part of a Run AMOC(asterisk) festival of 12 productions at Lincoln Center that include 10 New York premieres. Friday's performance can been viewed on a live stream on Lincoln Center's Facebook and YouTube channels. Planning, writing and funding took years Sharon first discussed the project in 2018 with countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, who sings Nerone and Julia's father, a stuffed shirt dressed like Mr. Monopoly. 'It fell apart so many times,' Constanzo said. 'First, the pandemic came, and so all of our plans we'd put together were dashed. Then we had one co-producer who was giving a lot of money and they pulled out. Then we got another co-producer to put that much money in again and they pulled out." Sharon had met Lewis at a 2018 Columbia University conference and approached him with the idea of concentrating on Poppea's upward mobility and creating 'a secondary story to complicate and to make a mess of this idea of authoritarianism.' Sharon trimmed 'Poppea' to its essence. Lewis' music, filled with dissonance and a snippet of jazz, mixes with the Monterverdi's baroque, which Jim first hears from the restaurant jukebox. 'The conception was one in which you knew from the beginning that there are moments of overlap, there are moments of exchange, of sequentiality,' Lewis said. 'It could stand alone by itself, `The Comet,' certainly." Lincoln Center is presenting a more ambitious offering of classical events after drawing criticisms in the first three seasons of Summer for the City that emerged from the pandemic. There are 266 scheduled events from June 11 through Aug. 9. Programs are set to include jazz, Latin music, R&B, Broadway, pop, Caribbean, dance and more.
Associated Press
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Nero's ancient Rome and Jazz Age New York meet in `The Comet/Poppea' at Lincoln Center
NEW YORK (AP) — Nero's ancient Rome and Jazz Age New York were similar. That is the message of 'The Comet/Poppea,' an intriguing combination of Monteverdi's 1643 opera 'L'incoronazione di Poppea' and George E. Lewis' 'The Comet,' a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year. The mashup conceived by director Yuval Sharon began a five-performance run at Lincoln Center's Summer for the City on Wednesday night. First seen in Los Angeles last year, the American Modern Opera Company production unfolds on a turntable that completes a spin each 2 minutes, 8 seconds. An audience of 380 is split into sections on opposite sides of the set on stage at the David Koch Theater while the venue's 2,586 auditorium seats remain empty. 'It's an unstable ride over the course of 90 minutes, and the power of the interpretation is up to each and every spectator,' Sharon said. 'Whether you're on one side of the seating bank or the other, you're going to have a totally different experience and you may miss a really important piece of action that your imagination is going to have to fill.' In Monteverdi's final opera, created to Giovanni Francesco Busenello's libretto, Nerone exiles his wife Ottavia, leaving him free to crown Poppea empress. Lewis composed 'The Comet' to librettist Douglas Kearney's adaption of W.E.B. Du Bois' dystopian eight-page 1920 short story in which a working-class Black man, Jim (Davóne Tines), and a society white woman, Julia (Kiera Duffy), believe they are the only survivors of a comet and can join to form a prejudice-free society. Their aspirations collapse when they learn people outside New York remained alive and segregation was unconquerable. 'People can make the leap between the music they're hearing and the kinds of tensions that are inherent to modern life and the tensions that the opera presents and the text presents, particularly around the dystopian aspect of white supremacy,' Lewis said. 'White supremacy is a kind of dystopia and it's a dystopia that we continue to live with today.' Different styles for different eras Mimi Lien's two-sided set, illuminated strikingly by John Torres, is tiered with a bath at the top level on the Roman portion and a red Art Deco restaurant evoking the Rainbow Room on the other, where Jim and Julia find three dead bodies slumped. 'Jim is confronted with what it means to be the only man left alive, what it newly means to be a Black man allowed into spaces he wasn't before, but then have that dream crushed by the reality of Julia also inhabiting that space,' said Tines, a commanding presence as Jim and the smaller role of Mercury. 'The Comet/Poppea' debuted at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA last June and also was performed with a student cast in Philadelphia in November. It is part of a Run AMOC(asterisk) festival of 12 productions at Lincoln Center that include 10 New York premieres. Friday's performance can been viewed on a live stream on Lincoln Center's Facebook and YouTube channels. Planning, writing and funding took years Sharon first discussed the project in 2018 with countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, who sings Nerone and Julia's father, a stuffed shirt dressed like Mr. Monopoly. 'It fell apart so many times,' Constanzo said. 'First, the pandemic came, and so all of our plans we'd put together were dashed. Then we had one co-producer who was giving a lot of money and they pulled out. Then we got another co-producer to put that much money in again and they pulled out.' Sharon had met Lewis at a 2018 Columbia University conference and approached him with the idea of concentrating on Poppea's upward mobility and creating 'a secondary story to complicate and to make a mess of this idea of authoritarianism.' Sharon trimmed 'Poppea' to its essence. Lewis' music, filled with dissonance and a snippet of jazz, mixes with the Monterverdi's baroque, which Jim first hears from the restaurant jukebox. 'The conception was one in which you knew from the beginning that there are moments of overlap, there are moments of exchange, of sequentiality,' Lewis said. 'It could stand alone by itself, `The Comet,' certainly.' Lincoln Center is presenting a more ambitious offering of classical events after drawing criticisms in the first three seasons of Summer for the City that emerged from the pandemic. There are 266 scheduled events from June 11 through Aug. 9. Programs are set to include jazz, Latin music, R&B, Broadway, pop, Caribbean, dance and more.
New York Times
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: ‘The Comet/Poppea' Merges Opera's Past and Present
When you enter the David H. Koch Theater for 'The Comet/Poppea,' you are directed not into the auditorium but through some passageways and onto the stage. It's a rare perspective to be facing a hall full of empty seats, with the delightful, rebellious undercurrent of being where you're not supposed to be. Being where you're not supposed to be is one of the few threads tying together the two operas that are played more or less simultaneously over the following 90 minutes. Monteverdi's 'L'Incoronazione di Poppea' (1643) charts the improbable climb of Nero's mistress to the throne of the Roman Empire. George Lewis's 'The Comet' (2024), set about a century ago, imagines a Black man who finds himself in a once segregated, now abandoned space after an apocalyptic event. The idea of intermingling these very different works came from the director Yuval Sharon, who is always cooking up half-mad ideas like this, and the American Modern Opera Company, or AMOC, a collective exploring its capacious vision of the art form over the next month during a residency at Lincoln Center. The audience for 'The Comet/Poppea,' which opened on Wednesday and runs through Saturday, sits in two sections facing each other across the stage. Between them is a large circular platform that has been divided in two. One side is the realistic, amber-lit restaurant of 'The Comet'; the other, where 'Poppea' plays, is a heavenly vision of a pristinely white Roman bath, the walls encrusted with white plaster flowers. This turntable is constantly rotating, in an effort to convey a sense of 'a visual and aural spiral,' as Sharon writes in a program note. But while 'The Comet/Poppea' tries to conjure a cyclone, whipping together past and present, Black and white, high class and low, naturalism and stylization, it ends up feeling more like a trudge. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Independent
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Performers and opera lovers see 'The Central Park Five' as a show of resistance against Trump
As Detroit Opera officials made plans last fall to bring a production based on the Central Park Five to their 2025 lineup, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump loomed large and just off stage. The opera puts to music the story of five Black and Latino teens imprisoned for the 1989 rape and beating of a white woman in New York's Central Park and prominently features Trump as a real estate showman calling for the death penalty in the case. Booking the production reflected a modern commitment to adding diverse and contemporary stories to opera houses in Detroit and elsewhere in the U.S., stages where classic composers have long reigned. But adding it to the calendar also forced officials to consider how Trump could react to the production if he won a second term as president, said Yuval Sharon, artistic director at the opera house. 'As soon as the election happened last November, we did think to ourselves, how can we best prepare our audience and prepare our community to know what they're about to see when they come to the Detroit opera," Sharon said. In true theater fashion, they decided to let the show go on, unaware that audiences would take their seats as Trump pursues dramatic changes to the arts in the U.S. He fired the Kennedy Center board, replaced them with loyalists and took over as board chair. He wrote on social media that members of the previous board 'do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.' Trump then took aim at the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities through proposed budget cuts. And earlier this month, he authorized a 100% tariff 'on any and all" foreign-produced movies coming into the U.S. 'Muggers and murderers' Debuting in 2019, 'The Central Park Five' opera won the Pulitzer Prize for music the following year. It has also been performed in Portland, Oregon, and Long Beach, California. So far, no other performances are on its calendar. At its heart are the events leading up to the arrests, convictions and imprisonment of Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise. The teens said their confessions to police were coerced. To many, the five came to embody the damage caused by a racist belief in out-of-control crime perpetrated by youths of color. Trump added fuel with full-page ads in New York newspapers. 'I want to hate these muggers and murderers,' Trump wrote in an ad in Newsday. 'They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes." 'It started with his demonizing five young boys, calling for the death penalty, and really exploiting the underlying racial animus that existed and racial anxiety in New York,' composer Anthony Davis said. 'That's become his playbook ever since, whether he's demonizing immigrants or he's demonizing trans people or he's demonizing homosexuals or demonizing anyone that he can view as the other.' The convictions of the five were vacated in 2002 after evidence linked a serial rapist to the crime. As president in 2019, Trump refused to apologize to the men, saying 'they admitted their guilt.' The opera includes a performer portraying Trump. 'We didn't make it more critical or less critical (of Trump),' Sharon said of the opera. 'What they did with this piece is they took Trump's own words and they set that to music. Ninety-five percent of the libretto is directly from the language that Trump used to insert himself in this story.' Resistance by creating and performing 'The Central Park Five' played for three dates in May in Detroit and people associated with the production said they experienced no significant backlash. Some in the arts community said moving forward with the performance was a sign of resistance — a mirror of artists or productions backing out of performances at the Kennedy Center to protest Trump's takeover. 'This is a stifling of the truth. This is a stifling of art,' performer Nathan Granner said of efforts to erase federal funding for arts programs. Granner, 43, has portrayed Korey Wise since the opera's launch. He says it did cross his mind with these performances whether opponents to the show could become violent. 'Is somebody going to come in and shoot up the building?' he said. 'They did very well in hiring extra security. We always felt safe.' With the performances done, Granner now wonders whether Trump's approach to the arts will shape audience interest and reactions in productions and other creations that don't fit with the president's idea of fine art. 'With the way the political climate is, I don't really foresee (another performance of 'The Central Park Five' opera) in the states in the next few years," Granner said, adding that if the opportunity arises, he would reprise the role of Wise.
Associated Press
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Performers and opera lovers see 'The Central Park Five' as a show of resistance against Trump
DETROIT (AP) — As Detroit Opera officials made plans last fall to bring a production based on the Central Park Five to their 2025 lineup, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump loomed large and just off stage. The opera puts to music the story of five Black and Latino teens imprisoned for the 1989 rape and beating of a white woman in New York's Central Park and prominently features Trump as a real estate showman calling for the death penalty in the case. Booking the production reflected a modern commitment to adding diverse and contemporary stories to opera houses in Detroit and elsewhere in the U.S., stages where classic composers have long reigned. But adding it to the calendar also forced officials to consider how Trump could react to the production if he won a second term as president, said Yuval Sharon, artistic director at the opera house. 'As soon as the election happened last November, we did think to ourselves, how can we best prepare our audience and prepare our community to know what they're about to see when they come to the Detroit opera,' Sharon said. In true theater fashion, they decided to let the show go on, unaware that audiences would take their seats as Trump pursues dramatic changes to the arts in the U.S. He fired the Kennedy Center board, replaced them with loyalists and took over as board chair. He wrote on social media that members of the previous board 'do not share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.' Trump then took aim at the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities through proposed budget cuts. And earlier this month, he authorized a 100% tariff 'on any and all' foreign-produced movies coming into the U.S. 'Muggers and murderers' Debuting in 2019, 'The Central Park Five' opera won the Pulitzer Prize for music the following year. It has also been performed in Portland, Oregon, and Long Beach, California. So far, no other performances are on its calendar. At its heart are the events leading up to the arrests, convictions and imprisonment of Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise. The teens said their confessions to police were coerced. To many, the five came to embody the damage caused by a racist belief in out-of-control crime perpetrated by youths of color. Trump added fuel with full-page ads in New York newspapers. 'I want to hate these muggers and murderers,' Trump wrote in an ad in Newsday. 'They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.' 'It started with his demonizing five young boys, calling for the death penalty, and really exploiting the underlying racial animus that existed and racial anxiety in New York,' composer Anthony Davis said. 'That's become his playbook ever since, whether he's demonizing immigrants or he's demonizing trans people or he's demonizing homosexuals or demonizing anyone that he can view as the other.' The convictions of the five were vacated in 2002 after evidence linked a serial rapist to the crime. As president in 2019, Trump refused to apologize to the men, saying 'they admitted their guilt.' The opera includes a performer portraying Trump. 'We didn't make it more critical or less critical (of Trump),' Sharon said of the opera. 'What they did with this piece is they took Trump's own words and they set that to music. Ninety-five percent of the libretto is directly from the language that Trump used to insert himself in this story.' Resistance by creating and performing 'The Central Park Five' played for three dates in May in Detroit and people associated with the production said they experienced no significant backlash. Some in the arts community said moving forward with the performance was a sign of resistance — a mirror of artists or productions backing out of performances at the Kennedy Center to protest Trump's takeover. 'This is a stifling of the truth. This is a stifling of art,' performer Nathan Granner said of efforts to erase federal funding for arts programs. Granner, 43, has portrayed Korey Wise since the opera's launch. He says it did cross his mind with these performances whether opponents to the show could become violent. 'Is somebody going to come in and shoot up the building?' he said. 'They did very well in hiring extra security. We always felt safe.' With the performances done, Granner now wonders whether Trump's approach to the arts will shape audience interest and reactions in productions and other creations that don't fit with the president's idea of fine art. 'With the way the political climate is, I don't really foresee (another performance of 'The Central Park Five' opera) in the states in the next few years,' Granner said, adding that if the opportunity arises, he would reprise the role of Wise.
