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...India and Pakistan and ethnic conflicts in Kosovo, the strategy is to book his days so fully that he never appears bogged down in scandal. Recent weeks have seen him planting flowers in Harpers Ferry, Va., talking to the Delaware assembly on education, discussing census sampling techniques at a Houston community center, dedicating a new institute at Walden Woods and studying tidal pools in Monterey, Calif. And, of course, raising money for Democrats almost everywhere. They now have a rich issue to add to their political war chests...
This is opera, right? Absolutely, says David Gockley, general director of the Houston Grand Opera, which has mounted an up-to-the-second production of Georges Bizet's Carmen to show off its new portable outdoor stage, a $1.4 million innovation designed to get the much admired company out of its fancy downtown theater and into the lives of Houstonians who don't know Don Jose from Donald Duck. Gockley calls it "nothing less than a new way to produce opera." Irreverent locals dubbed the show Carmen a-go-go but turned out to cheer. More than 7,000 paying...
...bother? According to Gockley, Houston Grand Opera, which is internationally renowned for its avant-garde productions, had come to be seen by its hometown as elitist. "The political and funding community," he says, "was telling us, 'We know you have a certain stature, but if you don't begin to reach and touch more people, you're going to gradually drop off our priority list.'" So he asked Billington and Foy to create a fully portable stage suitable for special performances aimed at young, TV-oriented viewers unfamiliar with opera. "What does rock 'n' roll do? That was our mandate...
...Houston has funding for four more years of outdoor productions, though no operas have been set yet. Next January the stage will be moved indoors for a production of Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music, starring Frederica von Stade. Several other opera houses have expressed interest in this new approach, and no doubt similar stages will soon be under construction. But the best thing about Houston's contemporary Carmen is not so much the modular stage, impressive though it is, as what Assaf has done with it. How do you get twentysomethings to fall for opera? The answer...
Nunn's production had its premiere in London in March, and (with the same cast, a mix of British and American actors) is making its American debut at Houston's Alley Theatre. It is a startling theatrical discovery: an impassioned social drama that is as far as one can imagine from the more personal, lyrical style that Williams introduced a few years later in The Glass Menagerie. The earlier play is something of a mess--more than three hours long, with too many characters and subplots, overwrought melodramatics and snippets of dialogue that sound like, well, bad Tennessee Williams (Girl...