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FEATURES
The New York Observer
The Daring Leading Player on the Flying Trapeze: Diane Paulus Takes Pippin to the Circus
By Harry Haun
April 23, 2013One thing the cast seems to agree on is the energy Diane Paulus brings to the production. Mr. Mann, a former Javert now with flowing white hair, has nothing but praise for the way she put the show together at Boston’s American Repertory Theatre, where she is artistic director. “She’s just the smartest person in the room,” he said.
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Boston Business Journal
Women Up- Diane Paulus
By Keith Regan
March 15, 2013“My generation of directors, you have to be an entrepreneur,” she said. “You have to think about how to get people to see your shows. ... I’ve found that thinking about what makes an audience want to come out and give their time and money in this very busy pace of the world we live in, was fuel for me.”
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The New Yorker
A Man and a Woman
September 26, 2011
By Hilton AlsDiane Paulus’s great achievement is to cut through Heyward’s muddy folklore and to present us with us something more profound. Her Porgy (the beautiful Norm Lewis) and Bess are not archetypal “black lovers”; they are a man and a woman, human beings who are not defined by their race. It was their humanity—their desire to be seen and their fear of being stripped bare by another—that left me breathless when Lewis and McDonald sang the duet “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” while trembling and glancing sideways at each other. By ridding the script of its sociological and anthropological strain, Paulus allows us to see the people and, perforce, to hear the music.
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The Star
The Big Interview with Diane Paulus
January 21, 2011
by Richard OuzounianThese days, Diane Paulus is truly the Queen of the Night. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about her Tony Award-winning revival of Hair (now touring North America), her ground-breaking work as the new head of the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard or her innovative production of The Magic Flute that opens for the Canadian Opera Company on Jan. 29, she is truly the woman of the moment when it comes to putting musical magic on stage.
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The New York Times
High Art Meets High Jinks Onstage
February 3, 2010
by Patrick HealyAudio Slideshow: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/07/theater/20100207-diane-paulus-multimedia/index.html
AS a theater director, Diane Paulus is a proud populist. What does that mean exactly? For Ms. Paulus it involves creating shows that appeal to the mainstream as well as theater snobs, and blurring the line between viewers and actors, which is why so many of her productions rely on an interactive relationship with the audience. Like the come-one-come-all dance party onstage at the end of her Broadway revival of “Hair.” Or the invitation to boogie on go-go boxes at her Shakespeare-meets-Studio-54 fantasia, “The Donkey Show.” Or a new musical about the Red Sox that is intended to draw on the enthusiasm of Boston fans.
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The Boston Globe
The Patrons Plunge In
January 22, 2010
by Geoff EdgersAfter struggling in recent years, the ART has created a splash on the cultural scene this season. Under new artistic director Diane Paulus, the company’s first two productions - both immersive, interactive, unconventional takes on Shakespeare - are selling out and attracting many who rarely go to the theater.
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The Boston Globe
Bold gestures, iron will
September 28, 2008
by Megan TenchAudio Slideshow: http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/specials/092808paulus/
"Through the years, Paulus went on to rack up a long list of accomplishments as a director - the revival of "Hair"; the acclaimed "Swimming With Watermelons," a show she co-wrote about the interracial romance between her Japanese mother and white father; the Obie Award-winning "Running Man" by jazz composer Diedre Murray and poet Cornelius Eady; as well as a number of operas. Now she is finally tackling an administrative post, as artistic director at the ART."
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The New York Times
Harvard’s Not-So-Square New Director
August 17, 2008
by Celia McGee"On the list of her accomplishments as a theater and opera director, Ms. Paulus, 42, could point to “The Donkey Show,” an adaptation of “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” set to 1970s disco that played the Pyramid Club and Club El Flamingo in New York as well as watering holes abroad; a Monteverdi “Orfeo” in the vein of Truman Capote; the English National Opera-Young Vic production of “Lost Highway,” based on the David Lynch movie; last summer’s pro wrestling-flavored “Turandot: The Rumble for the Ring” at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor, N.Y.; and the New York Shakespeare Festival’s “Hair,” now at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. Generation MTV in their sensory overload, often with compact running times and orgiastically esoteric in their sourcing, these productions could take the starch out of the most tightly stuffed J. Press shirt."
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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 Gazette
Review: Cirque du Soleil's Amaluna is poetry in acrobatic motion
By Pat Donnelly
April 26, 2013Director Diane Paulus has created an isle of enchantment under the Cirque du Soleil big top with her richly theatrical, hauntingly poetic Amaluna. We’re invited us to wonder, like Miranda does in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world that has such people in’t.”
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Time Out
Pippin
By Adam Feldman
April 23, 2013Ladies and gentlemen, step right up to the greatest show of the Broadway season: Diane Paulus’s sensational cirque-noir revival of Pippin. Here, in all its grand and dubious glory, is musical-theater showmanship at its best, a thrilling evening of art and craftiness spiked with ambivalence about the nature of enthrallment.
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National Post
Cirque's Amaluna a Shakespearan classic with a woman's touch
By Pat Donnelly
April 19, 2013While describing her first Cirque du Soleil show at a recent media event in Montreal, New York theatre director and Harvard professor Diane Paulus said the most beautiful thing about working on it has been collaborating with performers from around the world (15 countries to be exact). “I’ve done a lot of theatre,” she said, “but I’ve never done a show with this many people from this many countries.”
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Variety
Review: 'Pippin'
By Frank Rizzo
January 4, 2013The long journey to create a successful revival of the 1970s hit musical “Pippin” seemed as endless as the title character’s meandering search for his life’s purpose in a wicked world. But Diane Paulus’ Cirque du Showbiz production — which preemed at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., prior to its current Broadway run at the Rialto’s Music Box Theater — is sure to create positive buzz. The time for “Pippin” has finally come.
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Time Magazine
Loves you, Porgy
By Richard Zoglin
September 26, 2011
This latest Porgy, from director Diane Paulus (the revival of Hair) and playwright Suzan-Lori Parks (Topdog/Underdog) makes revisions that are respectful, not radical. The story of a doomed love affair between a crippled beggar (Norm Lewis) and the "loose woman" he takes in (Audra McDonald, in the role of her career) has been trimmed to just over two hours and unfolds not on naturalistic sets but in front of an abstract, driftwood-like backdrop. But the opera is all there in spirit. Starting with Nikki Renée Daniels' exquisite opening rendition of "Summertime," the Paulus-Parks Porgy is a streamlined, intimate, musically ravishing show.
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Variety
The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess
September 1, 2011
By Frank Rizzo
Operatic aspirations are replaced with the accessibility, theatricality and showbiz savvy of a Broadway musical in Diane Paulus' bright, beautiful and tuner-centric re-envisioning of "Porgy and Bess."
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The New York Times
'Capeman' Outdoors, Starring the City
August 17, 2010
by Ben BrantleyBut in the park, as staged (and radically streamlined) by Diane Paulus ("Hair"), the show felt like an organic part of a New York tradition of tale-telling, of how accounts of tragic events in an overcrowded city are passed around and passed down until they become urban legends.
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Variety
Johnny Baseball
June 3, 2010
by Frank RizzoClerverly crafted and terrifically performed... Helmer Diane Paulus hits a clean line drive straight into center field with a thoughtful, crowd-pleasing and deftly balanced show.
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Chicago Tribune
COT's dazzling 'robot opera' poses provocative new questions
'Death and the Powers' at its heart is about family connections
April 03, 2011
By John von RheinThis is a show unlike anything you have ever seen or heard before. "Death and the Powers" is a cautionary tale about the romance and mystery of technology that enlists some of the most complex, sophisticated technology to have been put on the operatic stage. But, for all its computer-generated theatrical dazzle – created by Machover's Opera of the Future group at the MIT Media Lab -- it is at heart a poignant family drama, about how we connect, and how the choices we make in life impact on those we care about and who care about us.
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Variety
Prometheus Bound
March 7, 2011
By Frank RizzoIt's not been a good year for the world's tyrants. And now, even Zeus is being challenged in a raw and rocking version of "Prometheus Bound," helmed with a fierce rebel spirit by Diane Paulus. Propelled by a lean script and cut-to-the-quick lyrics by Steve Sater and an angst-filled score by Serj Tankian, this world preem hits the zeitgeist jackpot.
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The New York Times
A Novel 'Gatsby': Stamina Required
February 5, 2010
by Ben BrantleyWhat happens between a novel and a consenting reader is usually a deeply personal activity, occurring behind the closed doors of individual minds. It is arguably more intimate and subjective than sex. And if someone asked you, “Want to watch me read a book for the next six or seven hours?” you would probably — and wisely — decline.
Yet this is the invitation being extended by Elevator Repair Service’s “Gatz,” at the American Repertory Theater here through Sunday. And to turn down the offer would be to miss one of the most exciting and improbable accomplishments in theater in recent years.
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New York Observer
Outer Space Opera
January 19, 2010
by Zachary WoolfeThe production uses the planetarium’s $3.5 million Zeiss Mark IX projector and its library of NASA-produced footage to conjure up the adorably zany central fantasy of the opera, in which two daughters try to get their overprotective father to consent to their marriages by convincing him that he’s traveled to—you guessed it!—the moon.
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New York Times
A Space Opera in a Proper Galaxy
January 14, 2010
by Matthew GurewitschNeal Goren, the founding artistic director of Gotham Chamber Opera, set his sights on “Il Mondo Della Luna” long ago. “We couldn’t do it at our original theater because the pit is too small,” Mr. Goren said during a break in late December at a soaring rehearsal studio in Brooklyn, where daylight and neon mingled in an unearthly glare. “For a while I was looking for an empty warehouse or other raw space. Then I took my nephew to the planetarium one day, and it came to me: Bingo! Why not here?”
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The Boston Globe
Dream in 'Donkey Show' is Shakespearean
September 14, 2009
by Don AucoinIn less capable hands, it could have been a travesty or a mere stunt. But codirectors Diane Paulus and Randy Weiner, who created “Donkey Show’’ a decade ago in New York, have devised a visual language to express the essence of Shakespeare’s play while not using a word of his text (unless the line “I am your boogie man. You turn me on’’ somehow got left out of my Pelican edition Shakespeare).
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Metro International
Singing joy to the 'Worlds'
December 10, 2009
by Nick DussaultThe American Repertory Theater’s new artistic director has single-handedly made both the Bard and the A.R.T. exciting again. With “Best of Both Worlds,” the final installment in her Shakespeare Exploded! Festival, Paulus offers a stripped-down, contemporized re-imagining of “The Winter’s Tale” that will astound you with its soulful sounds and brilliantly accessible, edge-of-your-seat storytelling.
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The Boston Phoenix
Joyful Noise
December 9, 2009
by Carolyn ClayFrom the clamorous arrival of some ghetto hot wheels to a scorching gospel finale, Best of Both Worlds warms up The Winter's Tale. The third entry in American Repertory Theater's Shakespeare Exploded! Festival, this sizzling and soulful gloss on the Bard's late romance (at the Loeb Drama Center through January 3) mines Shakespeare's time- and realm-hopping fairy tale — here rooted in a falling out between rhythm-and-blues kingpins — for all its raging irrationality and redemptive magic, transforming it into a furious and funny funk opera with one foot in R&B, the other in the black church. The show contains only shards of real and faux Shakespeare, but the compelling score by Dierdre Murray, poured over pipes that will bring you alternately to your feet and your knees, packs an eloquence of its own.
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The New York Times
A Frizzy, Fizzy Welcome to the Untamed ’60s
April 1, 2009
by Ben BrantleyThat there’s nothing of the museum — or, worse, of the vintage jukebox — about Ms. Paulus’s production isn’t because she’s reinterpreted or even reframed it. She does what Bartlett Sher did for “South Pacific” last year, finding depths of character and feeling in what most people dismissed as dried corn. It’s not so much what Ms. Paulus brings to “Hair”; it’s what she brings out of it, vital elements that were always waiting to be rediscovered.
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The New York Sun
Glimmerglass Times Four (on an Elizabethan Stage)
August 21, 2008
by Nicholas Wapshott"Diane Paulus's "Kate" moves along at a hectic comic pace, with Lisa Vroman's Lilli/Kate spiritedly played as a man-hating closet dominatrix scorned by her double-dealing ex-husband Fred/Petruchio, a well-turned if rather too stolid Brad Little. The staging is unexpected and ingenious. The sets, fresh and exciting; the chorus direction inventive and involving. If some of the voices are not quite what we might expect from an opera company venturing onto the Great White Way, the gusto more than makes up. And the hilarious handling of the hood duet "Brush Up Your Shakespeare" by Michael Mott and Brad Nacht, tenors posing as Sopranos, stops the show in its tracks. Broadway producers in search of a ready-made production for an empty theater this fall should head to Cooperstown without delay."
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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."