This time, though, she is given little opportunity to create a character. In director Christophe Honoré’s startlingly original production of Puccini’s opera at the 2019 Aix-en-Provence Festival, Blue starred as a young singer learning the role and captured the audience’s imagination in a new and moving way.

for her first starring role with the company. Now an international star, she returns to L.A. The main draw is Angel Blue, who already attracted attention as a student at UCLA and as someone coming up through the ranks at L.A. That still holds despite the fact that the three leading singers have been shown to be talented actors. When it was first seen here, the takeaway was that you should come for the singing, not the staging. A creepy Dutch National Opera production by director Barrie Kosky, which can be watched on, is so disturbing that it is almost guaranteed to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.Ĭaird’s “Tosca,” however, takes no risks. Puccini’s “Tosca,” written in 1900, can be meaningful modern theater as well, with its vivid representation of political oppression and sexual abuse. Last month, it offered the West Coast premiere of “Omar.” Matthew Passion” from the Hamburg Ballet, and it premiered the pertinent new opera “ In Our Daughter’s Eyes” by Du Yun. Earlier this year, the company boldly presented Bach’s “St. Opera is not oblivious to new, relevant and challenging work. Maybe the more intriguing question at this “Tosca” was: How much does operatic progress matter? L.A. Reporting from Las Vegas the other day, my colleague Mikael Wood noted that the cheapest seat to hear Adele in what is considered an intimate space for pop music, a theater with 1,000 more seats than the already-too-large Dorothy Chandler, was $800, double the top price for “Tosca.” Reports are circulating that a single seat in the inhumanly humongous SoFi Stadium for the last night of Taylor Swift’s appearances next summer could buy you an entire balcony at the Chandler. Phil goes further.Īnd wait a minute, that seat that cost the price of a drink and small snack happened to be $27, and it is in the top balcony where the acoustics are often the best. The classical world has been championing Black composers Florence Price and Margaret Bonds, but the L.A. Otherwise, the art form will die.Įntertainment & Arts Everyone is ‘rediscovering’ Florence Price. As if he had just such a “Tosca” in mind, the head of the Arts Council England, Darren Henley, defending the recent defunding of business-as-usual opera in Britain, made the withering suggestion last week that what is needed to make opera modern and accessible is to take it out of the opera house and bring it to the people in their pubs and car parks. It was, in what might be the dismissive public imagination, an elitist night at the opera. The line at the intermission bar, where a drink and a bag of potato chips along with tip could cost nearly as much as the cheapest seat, was long. The audience was dressed well, some even flamboyantly. The needle on the meter that measures how much the art form of opera might have moved forward this evening didn’t budge. 10, was impressively sung if theatrically conventional.

Saturday night’s performance at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the first of six through Dec. The cast, headed by popular Los Angeles native Angel Blue, as well as the conductor and production team are nearly all familiar. The well-traveled production by British director John Caird, first seen here in 2013, has been revived.

Intermission bar