kathryn lewek queen of the night lyric opera chicago

It is not easy to put a stamp on Kosky, whose production of Puccini’s “La Bohème” will open Los Angeles Opera’s season Saturday night, something the company no doubts hopes will help take attention away from its examination of the Plácido Domingo sexual harassment scandal. He supplies dance numbers that are camp beyond Las Vegas or Taylor Mac, and a cancan beyond belief to the degree that it becomes ineffably moving, capable of causing you to fall in love with characters of every body size and type, in every state of flamboyant dress and no dress at all, many of whom may have earlier repulsed you.

Kosky gives us coarse characters, expert at grossing us out. So light presumably that the composer’s 200th birthday in June was all but ignored by the otherwise anniversary-obsessed classical music world.īut here we discover a biting French satirist, master of the goofy and grotesque. The production is a dismaying, yet magnificent, overthrowing of the Offenbach typically presented as an innocuously charming wit who gave the world the light entertainment of operetta. More than once at the Salzburg Festival last month, I was asked not whether I liked Barrie Kosky’s outrageous new production of Offenbach’s “Orphée aux Enfers” (Orpheus in the Underworld), but whether I hated it.

Kathryn lewek queen of the night lyric opera chicago