News & Blog
Opera review: Fort Worth Opera Festival’s ‘Lysistrata’ sexy
Date: 5/27/2012 By Scott Cantrell, The Dallas Morning News
Let's be honest: In varying proportions, under various degrees of camouflage, operas are about sex and power. But apart from Alban Berg's Lulu, I can't think of another opera quite so "out there" with sex as Mark Adamo's Lysistrata, performed Saturday night at the Fort Worth Opera Festival.
The opera is loosely based on the venerable Aristophanes comedy. Here, when the women of both Athens and Sparta declare a moratorium on sex until their men give up warfare, the men's Greco-Roman soldier skirts quite vividly portray their, uh, unsatisfied sexual potency.
The Bass Performance Hall audience guffawed gleefully through this and plenty of double entendres. And, both theatrically and musically, this was a vivid, and entertaining, realization of Adamo's 7-year-old opera, premiered by Houston Grand Opera and subsequently performed by New York City Opera. Stage director David Gately has done his work splendidly.
-- Scott Cantrell, The Dallas Morning News
Click here to read the entire Lysistrata review.
Date: 5/27/2012 By Scott Cantrell, The Dallas Morning News
Let's be honest: In varying proportions, under various degrees of camouflage, operas are about sex and power. But apart from Alban Berg's Lulu, I can't think of another opera quite so "out there" with sex as Mark Adamo's Lysistrata, performed Saturday night at the Fort Worth Opera Festival.
The opera is loosely based on the venerable Aristophanes comedy. Here, when the women of both Athens and Sparta declare a moratorium on sex until their men give up warfare, the men's Greco-Roman soldier skirts quite vividly portray their, uh, unsatisfied sexual potency.
The Bass Performance Hall audience guffawed gleefully through this and plenty of double entendres. And, both theatrically and musically, this was a vivid, and entertaining, realization of Adamo's 7-year-old opera, premiered by Houston Grand Opera and subsequently performed by New York City Opera. Stage director David Gately has done his work splendidly.
-- Scott Cantrell, The Dallas Morning News
Click here to read the entire Lysistrata review.
