DIANE PAULUS Director of Theater and OperaHome Productions Photo Gallery Video Press Biography Contact
FEATURES
The New York Times
Harvard’s Not-So-Square New Director
August 17, 2008
by Celia McGee"To Ms. Paulus falls the task of revitalizing a theater that has lost luster and audiences since its heyday in the 1980s under Robert Brustein, who retired in 2002 but retains the title artistic consultant.
She can and has drawn on many different cultures, from hip-hop to Aeschylus to the American musical classics reflected in her staging of 'Kiss Me Kate' at the Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, N.Y., this summer; adaptations of Cornelius Eady’s bluesy work; and the love story of her own G.I. father and Japanese mother in the aftermath of World War II, told in her acclaimed 'Swimming With Watermelons.' "
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Harvard University Gazette
Diane Paulus appointed artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre
May 16, 2008"Harvard University and the American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.) announced today (May 16) the appointment of Diane Paulus as artistic director. She will be the third artistic leader of the A.R.T., following founding director Robert Brustein (1980–2002) and Robert Woodruff (2002–07). Paulus is a critically acclaimed director of theater and opera; her productions have garnered multiple Obie awards, and she is one of the most highly regarded theater artists in the country. She will begin her responsibilities in the fall with the planning of the 2009-10 season."
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Evening Standard
It's an Opera Mash-Up
March 12, 2008
By Fiona Maddocks
"When American director Diane Paulus flew in from the States last month, the passport official asked her what she was doing here. 'I'm staging a new opera,' Paulus began brightly. 'Uh huh,' replied the official, head down, bored. 'An opera based on a film, David Lynch's Lost Highway,' she persevered. The official looked up. 'Now that's more interesting.' "Link to Complete Article
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Opera News - Feature
Rebel with a Cause
by Mark Thomas Ketterson
August 2006, Vol 71, no. 2"For her superb staging of The Turn of the Screw, Paulus stripped the stage bare to the back wall, leaving the characters to wander surreally through a carpet of funereal white lilies; the resultant permeability of actual versus theatrical reality perfectly reflected the disintegration of the protagonist’s mind, her haunting cries of “lost, lost” pealing with eerie poignancy in this created environment. In quite another vein, the cynical decadence of Nero’s court in Monteverdi’s Poppea was searingly captured by gilding the production with ostentatious, Vegas-inspired glitz; Seneca’s death was splashed across the tabloids like so much glitterati gossip."
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American Theatre
She Turns the Beat Around
Director Diane Paulus taps the zeitgeist with a mixture of music, pop culture, improvisation— and a little help from her friends
By Lenora Inez Brown
January 2002"Paulus’s dedication to the ensemble environment gives her productions the sense of being assembled by a group of dear friends who are, if nothing else, enthusiastic about theatre—a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland hey-let’s-put-on-a-show atmosphere. What audiences see and remember, however, is something far more sophisticated and precise. When Paulus conjures up a place—a ’70s disco in The Donkey Show, her Gen-X version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; or a World War II—era auditorium crowded with GI’s in Swimming with Watermelons, based in part on the true-life experiences of her parents—she guides her company’s movements so skillfully that, even without a set, the location in all its dimensions is crystal clear. Her approach is similar to a dance in that way: bodies create environments, not just character. "
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REVIEWS
The New York Times
Let the Sunshine In, and the Shadows
August 8, 2008"Ms. Paulus elicits the shadows amid the starshine without ever imposing the irony of hindsight. Incorporating inspired choreography by Karole Armitage, she creates a show that feels as organic and natural as any upstate commune dweller could wish for. Even the very visible onstage band, under a tie-dyed canopy, feels as it had sprouted there, like so many musical mushrooms."
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TIME Magazine
A New Dawn for Hair
July 31, 2008"Hair may have its stars in alignment at last. A definitive version of the groundbreaking show has just started a monthlong run in New York City's outdoor Delacorte Theater in Central Park. Expanded from a concert version that ran for a weekend last September, the revival is being produced by the city's Public Theater, Joseph Papp's downtown theater lab that first opened its doors in 1967 with Hair. It is returning on the 40th anniversary of the show's Broadway debut. All the tickets, fittingly, are free. Most folks queue up on the Internet now (for seats chosen by lottery) rather than stand in line all day long, but it's the hottest ticket in New York City."
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The Oneida Daily Dispatch
Glimmerglass Opera opens season with a racy "Kiss Me, Kate"
July 8, 2008
by Wayne Meyers
"The significance of what transpired at the Alice Busch Opera Theater last Saturday night was not lost on me. Glimmerglass Opera launched its Shakespeare-linked 2008 festival season with a musical-the first since the company's founding in 1975. And so on this night Cole Porter joined the likes of Donizetti, Britten and Rossini in having his work staged at this Hugh Hardy-designed countryside opera house on the shore of Otsego Lake. But I didn't dwell on that for too long. I was too busy enjoying Diane Paulus' ribald staging of Porter's 1948 'Kiss Me, Kate.' "Link to Complete Article
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Chicago Sun-Times
Glover-Paulus team creates a superb 'Don Giovanni' for Chicago Opera Theater
May 2, 2008"Dark. Very dark. Beautiful. Disturbing. Provocative. Hilarious. Chilling. Engrossing.
Chicago Opera Theater has scored another triumph with its new production of 'Don Giovanni,' the last of the Mozart/Da Ponte trilogy to be taken up by the company's superb partnership of conductor Jane Glover and director Diane Paulus."Link to Complete Article
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The Independent
Lost Highway, Young Vic, London
Tuesday, 8 April 2008
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/reviews/lost-highway-young-vic-london-805736.html"Director Diane Paulus does a stunning job. Her designers turn the Young Vic into a neon-lit installation: four giant video screens filtering both live and pre-filmed images around a suspended Plexiglas box from which descends a white spiral staircase – the stairway to and from psychosis, mission control for Lynch's weird and wonderful imaginings. "
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NEWSDAY
The Top 10 in Theater by Linda Winer
January 11, 20088. "HAIR." The Public Theater produced just three raucous and perfectly heartbreaking performances in Central Park in September. It was a 40th anniversary of what turns out to have been a surprisingly resilient and tragically timely musical. The Public did not want reviews for what turned out to be one of the memorable experiences of the year. The production deserved to live on. So sorry you missed it.
http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/stage/ny-2007theater,0,3631129.story
Greenwich Village Gazette
Another Country - Review by Arlene McKanic
November 20, 2007"...director and adaptor Diane Paulus has managed to put on a splendid, moving show...In Another Country, Paulus brings out the humanity of a group of troubled people in a troubled country. "
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Columbia News
James Baldwin’s Another Country Hits the Riverside Theatre Stage
Nov. 15, 2007
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/07/11/baldwin.html“Another Country is a history lesson of life in America, one that is filled with outrage, brutal honesty and searing passion.”
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THE EAST HAMPTON STAR
Get Ready to Rumble
July 17th, 2007
By Regina Weinreich
“The adrenaline rush at the Bay Street Theatre is as immediate as watching a smackdown on “WrestleMania” in its production of the musical cum tournament, “Turandot: Rumble for the Ring.” The show features a center stage arena, overhead screens for riveting close-ups, a barking M.C., a pair of comic commentators, and mini-skirt-clad blondes cavorting about and exhorting the crowd. This is an event for sports fans, rock fanatics, multitaskers, the A.D.D. generation, and, yes, lovers of traditional musical theater. From the start-up sing-along of “The Star-Spangled Banner” to the fight finale, few theater pieces, let alone opera-based, legend-inspired remakes, have worked so hard at engaging an audience and succeeded so well.”
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Chicago Tribune
COT scores a triumph in 'Return of Ulysses'
March 30, 2007
By John von Rhein
Tribune music critic“Paulus has made the highly stylized conceits of early Italian Baroque opera feel as fresh to modern ears as the tangy, colorful continuity of sounds Glover, working from her own edition of the score, elicits from her fine period-instruments orchestra. Together they inspire a large, mostly young ensemble -- typical of general director Brian Dickie's shrewd casting of singers -- to make the words and notes of this text-driven opera really matter to us. The result is living, breathing drama that speaks with a contemporary voice.”
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Chicago Tribune
'Figaro' set in Miami has steam, sass, dream cast
May 5, 2005
By John von Rhein
Tribune music critic“It’s our old friend "Figaro," all right, done up in the authentic musical style and delicious theatricality that have marked Chicago Opera Theater's four previous collaborations by conductor Jane Glover and director Diane Paulus…Moving the action from 18th-Century Seville to Clinton-era Florida, Paulus reminds us how contemporary Mozart's serious comedy of Eros really is. As with her witty "Cosi Fan Tutte" for COT in 2002, the director has two couples facing some painful emotional truths and learning that trust, honesty and fidelity never come cheap…Even if you've seen "Figaro" scores of times, COT's dream cast and a delightful production make this a wedding you simply must attend.”
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Chicago Tribune
Chicago Opera Theater debuts with bold 'Coronation' Chicago Opera Theater baptizes new home with flawless 'Coronation'
February 18, 2004
By John von Rhein
Tribune music critic“With this latest entry in their Monteverdi cycle for Chicago Opera Theater, conductor Jane Glover and director Diane Paulus have given us a bold contemporary perspective on this Baroque masterpiece that leaps across the centuries with astonishing immediacy… …The Monteverdi "Orfeo" Glover and Paulus put together for COT in 2000 was a model of how old operatic wine can be poured into shiny new bottles; so is their "Poppea." Robert Brill's spare sets, David C. Woolard's modern costuming and Allen Hahn's stark lighting draw telling parallels between the sleazy hedonism of Nero's palace and the glitzy vulgarity of a Vegas pleasure dome… as close to flawless as a production can be: admirably sung and acted, imaginatively staged and stylishly performed by a dream ensemble of period instruments under Glover's direction.”
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Chicago Sun-Times
COT opens season with engrossing 'Turn'
March 28, 2003
by Wynne Delacoma Classical Music Critic“Paulus and Glover are working their magic again…Using minimal sets and retaining the 19th-century English country setting of James' story, COT's "Turn of the Screw'' takes us into a world as familiar as a Jane Austen novel or a Merchant-Ivory film, yet as disorienting as a fog-shrouded Impressionist landscape…Britten's tale of two orphaned children menaced by the ghosts of their dead governess, Miss Jessel, and a mysterious man-servant, Peter Quint, becomes an engrossing swirl of reality and fantasy, unbounded goodness and absolute malevolence.”
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The New Yorker
GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
Swimming With Watermelons
April 15th, 2002"It's a delight, beginning to end."
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TIME Magazine
Playlist of Your Dreams
The music of rock’s greatest generation, long absent from the theater, is finding new life on stage
By Richard Zoglin
May 28, 2001"Both Joplin and Nyro (who died of cancer in 1997) are back together onstage, after a fasion — each being celebrated in a new off-Broadway show. In Eli’s Comin’ five performers (including golden-voiced Broadway vet Judy Kuhn) wend their way through a bookless compendium of 20 of Nyro’s best-known songs. Though assembled into a very loose narrative (young girl arrives in New York City; by the end she’s sharing confessions with what looks like a therapy group), the show works best ‘ marvelously’ as a showcase for Nyro’s idiosyncratic and influential music, a lush, emotionally vivid, rhythmically complex mixture of folk, rock, gospel and jazz."
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Chicago Tribune
'Orfeo' gamble pays off
by John von Rhein
Tribune Music Critic
October 29th, 2000"Paulus, in her operatic directing debut, sets the aboveground action in a brilliant all-white drawing room where the passionate lovers (Laurence Dale and Valerie MacCarthy) are surrounded by masked revelers at a high-society ball. After Orfeo travels down to Hades to rescue his dead sife, he finds her at the banquet table of Plutone (Andrew Funk), dressed in a red silk smoking jacket. With the coval ensemble never far from the center of the action, the stage is alive with fluid, stylized movement that takes its dramatic cues from the gut strings and valveless brasses in the pit."
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Chicago Sun-Times
'Orfeo'
by Wynne Delacoma Classical Music Critic
October 19th, 2000"Stage director Diane Paulus had the brilliant idea of staging "Orfeo" as a chic, contemporary party celebrating the long-delayed wedding of Orfeo, a bad-boy artist, and Euridice, the beautiful daughter of rich, worldly parents. The vision, aided by Scott Pask's airy white set and Michael Chybowski's evocative lighting, worked effortlessly. Costume designer Meg Neville dressed the men in tuxedoes and the women in coolly sophisticated black-and-white gowns. The atmosphere easily combined the high spirits of a bachelor party with the allure of a formal dinner party on Manhattan's Upper East Side."
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The New York Times
Not Your Mother’s Musical, and That’s the Point
By Eric V. Copage
September 6, 1999“ 'They never just throw something on stage because it looks cool,” [Clancy] said. “They are always asking: ‘What does it mean? How does it add to the story?’ That is how they can take something that seems like it will be campy — Shakespeare retold through disco songs — and make it work. Because these songs really do tell the story, they are not just grafted to the plot line. Project 400 shows a commitment to populist theater that isn’t diluted or watered down. ' ”
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The New York Times
They Be Foolish Mortals Who Love the Nightlife
By Peter Marks
August 27th, 1999"If music be the food of love, “The Donkey Show” is a bowl of jalapenos. This rollicking hour of sex, drugs and sweaty gyrations marries the 70’s disco craze to, of all things, the work of William Shakespeare."
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The New York Times
A Young Man of Promise Who Has Lost His Way
by Peter Marks
March 5th, 1999"Based on the moving poetry of Cornelius Eady and the plaintive, sweet-and-sour music of the jazz composer Diedre Murray, "Running Man" occupies a category of theater all its own. Operating at the exotic juncture where chamber musical, jazz session and opera might converge, the piece, performed spectacularly by a cast of six and a five member orchestra, taps a well of feeling so deep at times it seems spiritual. By no means is this a conventional musical — there are no show tunes in this show — but it shares with the successful versions of more mainstream forms an eloquence in structure and storytelling."