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 | Film |
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| | Arts Calendar / May 30 / Film |
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| Theatre HD Live in Cinema: La Sonnambula |
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The Metropolitan Opera 2009, 142 min. Directed by Mary Zimmerman. Starring: Natalie Dessay, Juan Diego Flórez, Michele Pertusi. In Italian. Just as a young woman is about to marry her sweetheart, she is discovered - by the entire village, to say nothing of her fiancé - asleep in the bedroom of a stranger. It takes the young man two acts to figure out that sleepwalking is to blame, and everything ends happily. Natalie Dessay as Amina and Juan Diego Flórez as Elvino deliver bel canto magic and vocal fireworks in Mary Zimmerman’s 2009 production. The Tony award-winning director transfers Bellini’s bucolic tale to a rehearsal room in contemporary New York, where an opera company rehearses La Sonnambula—and where the singers are truly in love with each other. Watch online here.
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| Theatre HD Live in Cinema: Les Troyens |
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The Metropolitan Opera 2012, 180 min. Directed by Francesca Zambello. Starring: Deborah Voigt, Susan Graham, Bryan Hymel. In French, Berlioz’s epic masterpiece retells the magnificent saga of the aftermath of the Trojan War and the exploits of Aeneas. Rising tenor Bryan Hymel, in his Met debut, stars as the hero charged by the gods with the founding of the city of Rome. Susan Graham is Dido, Queen of Carthage, who becomes Aeneas’s lover, and Deborah Voigt sings Cassandra, the Trojan princess whose warnings about the impending destruction of Troy go unheeded. Francesca Zambello’s atmospheric production, featuring choreography by Doug Varone, is led by Met Principal Conductor Fabio Luisi. Watch online here.
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| Theatre HD Live in Cinema: The Comedy of Errors |
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Shakespeare's Globe 2014, 141 min (with one intermission). Directed by Blanche McIntyre. Starring: Matthew Needham, Simon Harrison, Jamie Wilkes. Take one pair of estranged twin brothers (both called Antipholus), and one pair of estranged twin servants (both called Dromio), keep them in ignorance of each other and throw them into a city with a reputation for sorcery, and you have all the ingredients for theatrical chaos. One Antipholus is astonished by his foreign hospitality; the other enraged by the hostility of his home town. The Dromios, caught between the two, are soundly beaten for obeying all the wrong orders. Basing his plot on a farce by Plautus, Shakespeare caps the mayhem of his Roman original to build up a hectic tale of violent cross-purposes, furious slapstick and social nightmare. The final Globe On Screen film for 2015 brings the perfect light relief to close an epic season of war and tragedy. This sell-out production employed authentic Renaissance costumes and staging and will have cinema audiences roaring with laughter as it crams in “more hilarious anarchy than you can shake a fish, cat or identity-confused servant at.” (London Theatre Guide). Watch online here.
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| Theatre HD Live in Cinema: This House |
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National Theatre 2012, 165 min. Directed by Jeremy Herrin. Starring: Julian Wadham, Vincent Franklin, David Hounslow. In English. 1974. The UK faces economic crisis and a hung parliament. In a culture hostile to cooperation, it’s a period when votes are won or lost by one, when there are fist fights in the bars and when sick MPs are carried through the lobby to register their vote. Let those on the continent cooperate and hug and kiss each other on the ruddy cheek. Here in Britain, one party governs and we get things done. It’s a time when a staggering number of politicians die, and the building creaks under idiosyncrasies and arcane traditions. A minority government? No one with any sense or gumption gives you more than a matter of weeks. You’re gonna fall, and fast, and hard. So start finding things to land on. Now. Set in the engine rooms of Westminster, James Graham’s This House strips politics down to the practical realities of those behind the scenes: the whips who roll up their sleeves and on occasion bend the rules to shepherd and coerce a diverse chorus of MPs within the Mother of all Parliaments. This country is being kept alive on aspirin when what it needs is electric bloody shock therapy. Watch online here.
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