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“A Christmas Carol” As 1940’s Radio Drama in Old Town

By Ken Herman | December 4, 2012 |
Cast of Cygnet Theatre's "A Christmas Carol" (photo by Daren Scott)

As a conjurer of distinctive, unforgettable characters in his many novels, Charles Dickens could never be accused of lacking imagination. But I do wonder if he could have possibly imagined the many incarnations his 1843 book “A Christmas Carol” would assume in its long afterlife. Within a year of its publication, “A Christmas Carol” was adapted for the stage in both London and New York, and in recent decades its myriad theatrical presentations have become for North American drama companies the Christmas season cash cow that Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker” ballet is to countless dance ensembles. Ah, but the stage was only…

Major NEA Grants to San Diego Opera & Carlsbad Music Festival

By Ken Herman | November 28, 2012 |
San Diego Opera's 2012 MOBY-DICK (photo by Ken Howard)

The National Endowment for the Arts has selected two San Diego County music organizations for major grants for the coming year. NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman announced Tuesday (Nov. 27) that San Diego Opera is slated to receive a $50,000 grant in support of its new production in the spring of 2013 of 20th-century Italian composer Ildebrando Pizzetti’s Murder in the Cathedral. The other grant will be awarded to the Carlsbad Music Festival in the amount of $10,000 to support the contemporary music festival’s 10th Anniversary Festival, which will take place in Carlsbad in September 2013. These two organizations are clearly…

Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera Haunts San Diego Museum of Art

By Ken Herman | November 21, 2012 |
Jie Ma (photo courtesy of the performer)

Life and death. The really big topics. Once religion had the monopoly on this conversation, but in our essentially secular culture, the arts increasingly carry on the discussion. Art of Élan staged Tan Dun’s evocative, recondite “Ghost Opera” Tuesday (Nov. 20) at the San Diego Museum of Art’s Copley Auditorium, the second installment on the company’s avant garde series “in your dreams.” A theater piece that weaves aspects of ancient Chinese funeral rites with the warm sounds of the string quartet and the piquant edge of the pipa (a traditional Chinese lute), “Ghost Opera” creates an esoteric but mesmerizing 40-minute…

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