Post-minimalist satire? I think that I have been insulted. At the very least, you’ve accused me of being an Ivy Leaguer.

Why is anyone younger than Giocomo Puccini writing operas? Well, Benjamin Britten was trying to keep tenors employed. (I won’t delve further, but I am afraid Britten did.) By composing his cacophonous messes John Adams actually is performing acts of noble self-sacrifice; he is distracting the very innovative director Peter Sellars from ruining great operas. Sellars’ idea of “Don Giovanni” was set in Spanish Harlem and the Don was a drug dealer–exactly what Mozart and DaPonte had in mind.

Eugene

Bellisimo!

Me, I have only one question: why is ANYONE still writing “opera?” Didn’t that art form die out with the Hohenzollerns or Hohenstefferns or Hollziwhozisseseses?

If you’re writing for the theatre today and it’s got people singing where normal people would otherwise be having what we hillbillies call “dialogue,” wouldn’t that, in the era since Rodgers and Hart, Hammerstein or some drunk from the Bowery, be called “Musical Theatre?”

“There’s a bright golden haze on the dumpster . . . “