Review girls of the golden west sf opera
We learn of Ah Sing being sold by her mother for seven dollars, but worth $700 at the end we hear of Josefa’s first rendezvous with Ramon and Dame Shirley’s clunky relationship with the sewn-up tight husband who the opera weaves in and out like a thread that has lost all elasticity. Where were we going – into the comic? Into the stark? Into the symbolic? Act one was, in fact, a carefully-designed throw-together of place and time and people – their stories told, often in elaborate detail. The audience wasn’t sure whether this was a lark or serious gesture. In fact, small details such as the suspended covered wagon, more than aptly dramatized by Ned Peerless Peters and Dame Shirley jogging and rocking on land in an imaginary one, needed no visual accompaniment, especially when, after it was all over, the wagon literally descended on stage, only to rise again and disappear for good. The same went for the made-up mule Dame Shirley dragged into the first act for no substantive reason. If anything, some of that detail could be sacrificed, particularly since, in Act one, Sellars and Adams told us little new.
REVIEW GIRLS OF THE GOLDEN WEST SF OPERA TV
While not “Deadwood,” the cable TV show, nor Puccini’s colorful “La Fanciulla,” “Girls” introduces similar locales such as the Gambling hall, the Bar, the woods and mountains, the bedroom. The two acts with five scenes each detail the story of the Gold Rush and its environs. When the Chorus added itself, with its intriguing refrains and repetitions, we were lifted with the score’s excitement and celebrated the multi-national, multi-cultural brocade that is America.
REVIEW GIRLS OF THE GOLDEN WEST SF OPERA FULL
Woodblocks and bells, full and rich brass alternated in a wide range of rhythm and syncopations. Gershon, in his San Francisco debut, led the 67-piece orchestra with energy, aplomb and fervor instead of accompanying the singers, he led them, and us. Atomic,” on the maker of the atomic bomb, for example, Adams uses the sublime form of opera to address our human and cultural dimension and creates a very good and penetrating marriage. Adams’s music maps the textures of this world it mirrors. It was a time when greed, violence, and hypocrisy lived out its destiny. It’s a time when women were in danger of enjoying freedom, rather than the other way around.
We crossed its border, we were reminded, not the other way around. SFPLibrary’s Documents’ Division, to Mark Twain’s “Roughing It.” The title is partly lifted from Puccini’s “La Fanciulla del West” and the work itself is less of a dramatic than narrative excursion into the world of the Gold Rush in 1849, when California was still Mexico. The story is the result of a culling of documents and texts ranging from letters of Dame Shirley, a.k.a., Louise Clapp, v.