Performance The first thing to know about Turandot is that it is emphatically not about China. Though ostensibly the opera is set there, Puccini’s fictional Middle Kingdom bears so little resemblance to the    More

Arts & Books Quick: world is ending, and it’s your job to fill a space ship.  Who do you take?

How about an explosive retired navy captain and his leggy, put-upon wife?  Or a conspiracy-loving former CIA Agent?  What about a randy redneck girl and a geeky hipster boy?  Or a crooked TV news reporter who’ll do anything to win an Oscar?

That’s the premise for Planet Eden, a...   More

Arts & Books

Murderous clowns never sounded so good.

The curtain goes up. Onstage, in bright lights, lie two dead or nearly dead bodies, a woman in clown paint and a young man in plain clothes. Nearby sits the jealous husband who has stabbed them. The townspeople are poised to apprehend him, but at this moment, for some reason, they are frozen like a photograph, a tableau of horror and ou...   More

Performance The curtain rises. Onstage, in bright lights, lie the corpses of a woman in clown paint and a young man in plain clothes. Nearby sits the jealous husband who has stabbed them. The townspeople are pois ...   More

Arts & Books

Yoking vastly different operas on a single playbill was a gamble, but it paid off.

For its annual studio production, Portland Opera has programmed a show in two halves. Before intermission: Monteverdi. After: Bernstein.

Wait. What? That's right. No typo. Monteverdi, get up, stretch y...   More

Q & A Who among us has not wished for a literary concierge? Someone to tell us, “Read this, skip that”? Fortunately, for those who don’t have all day to spend wading through drivel, there& ...   More

News
Don Alfonso: What palaver. I thought I was in an opera.

A pair of Albanian princes with fake mustaches slink onstage toward the apprehensive young ladies. Wearing embroidered silk smoking jackets in a riot of Oriental colors, they recall SNL's Steve Martin ...   More

Performance A pair of Albanian princes with fake mustaches slink onstage toward the apprehensive young ladies. Wearing embroidered silk smoking jackets in a riot of Oriental colors, the pair recalls SNL’s S ...   More

Books There’s a great moment in “Retreat,” a new short story by Wells Tower. Two brothers have been out deer hunting on a chilly island in Maine. They haven’t bagged anything, and th ...   More

News

Above, the ravenous undead from Maelstrom, the Zombie Opera. Clever use of media and an apocalyptic classical score lend this low-budget production the aroma of big-screen medical dystopias like Resident Evil and ...   More