Barcelona’s Bad-Boy Director Hits The US Stage

Calixto Bieito has become notorious for his provocative, revisionist stagings of classic plays and operas (e.g., oral sex in a brothel in Mozart, a row of men sitting on toilets in Verdi). “The tension between lurid incitement and passionate tenderness is a crucial element in [his] style, but until now” – this month at Chicago’s Goodman Theater – “American audiences have only heard the incendiary sound bites.”

Was The Bridge Project Worth It?

Charles Isherwood finds the three-year collaboration between the Brooklyn Academy of Music, director Sam Mendes’s Neal Street Productions, and Kevin Spacey’s Old Vic to be a praiseworthy idea. But did the results as seen on stage merit the expense and logistical trouble of getting actors from New York and London together?