News & Blog
Lysistrata: Make War Not Love
Date: 5/30/2012 By Kristian Lin, Fort Worth Weekly
Fort Worth Opera puts on local theater’s best (non)sex comedy.
Fort Worth Opera’s commitment to new works continues with this frisky production of Adamo’s work. The composer came to prominence in 1998 with his opera version of Little Women. His Lysistrata debuted seven years later in Houston. Even though the original Greek stage play enjoyed a spate of new theatrical productions after the outbreak of the Iraq war, Adamo’s opera goes in for bigger statements on the nature of war and sexual power instead of bothering with topicality. (FWO’s staging gives one tip of the hat to current events, though: The Athenian war protesters hold up picket signs, one of which reads “Occupy Athens.”) Acting as his own librettist, Adamo adds freely to the source play, which is about a group of women in Athens and Sparta who band together to end the war between their states by withholding sex from their husbands. The heroine who comes up with the big idea is named Lysia in this telling, only receiving the name Lysistrata after her victory.
-- Kristian Lin, Fort Worth Weekly
Read the full Fort Worth Weekly review by clicking here.
Date: 5/30/2012 By Kristian Lin, Fort Worth Weekly
Fort Worth Opera puts on local theater’s best (non)sex comedy.
Fort Worth Opera’s commitment to new works continues with this frisky production of Adamo’s work. The composer came to prominence in 1998 with his opera version of Little Women. His Lysistrata debuted seven years later in Houston. Even though the original Greek stage play enjoyed a spate of new theatrical productions after the outbreak of the Iraq war, Adamo’s opera goes in for bigger statements on the nature of war and sexual power instead of bothering with topicality. (FWO’s staging gives one tip of the hat to current events, though: The Athenian war protesters hold up picket signs, one of which reads “Occupy Athens.”) Acting as his own librettist, Adamo adds freely to the source play, which is about a group of women in Athens and Sparta who band together to end the war between their states by withholding sex from their husbands. The heroine who comes up with the big idea is named Lysia in this telling, only receiving the name Lysistrata after her victory.
-- Kristian Lin, Fort Worth Weekly
Read the full Fort Worth Weekly review by clicking here.
