Florentine Opera opens its latest season this weekend with Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, one of the world's most popular operas and one of the greatest. Puccini's music is so psychologically transparent that the listener can absorb the action by listening to the score without benefit of dialogue or visuals and with only a rudimentary knowledge of the story. Madama Butterfly weaves a constant stream of underlying leitmotifs that change rapidly, always yielding melodic riches to illuminate the character's emotional state even before the character sings, motivating the action by enlightening the drama with a constant stream of melody. Todau’s production is at 3:30 p.m.
Remember when bands cared about albums as an art form? Instead of
slapping together a dozen tracks because, hey, they'll just end up on
everyone's iPod shuffle anyway, musicians considered how their songs
might congeal as a whole or form some sort of dram
Elvis Costello's frequent collaborator T-Bone Burnett produced Secret, Profane & Sugarcane,
an Americana-inflected album working with country and folk traditions
for images of sawdust floors set to mandolin and fiddle. Costello
intended one s
You wouldn’t expect to find T-bone and sirloin dinners at a place with stool seating and a location next to a shop hawking cell phones and cigarettes. But one of the city’s most evocatively named eateries, ZaZa Steak & Lemonade (4919 W. Capito
The enduring fantasy of older men is that a gorgeous
young woman will fall in love with them, find them sexually arousing
and long to imbibe their wisdom while sitting at their feet. That
fantasy is the spring driving Woody Allen's often-hilarious f
Away We Go, a droll comedy-cum-drama by director Sam Mendes (American Beauty),
perceptively explores the lives of more-or-less ordinary 30-somethings
lost in a world without much meaning. Verona (Maya Rudolph) and Bu
