Washington National Opera's Show Boat will depart the Kennedy Center Opera House soon, the end to an exceptionally fine mainstage season, but if you can scare up a ticket you shouldn't miss this quintessential American musical, lovingly and movingly staged by Francesca Zambello, WNO's artistic director.

Zambello has an...

Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev assembled the finest dancers, choreographers, scenic artists, and composers of the early twentieth century to launch the iconic ballet company whose legacy is now on display at the National Gallery of Art.

"Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, 1909-1929: When Art Danced with Music" opened May...

Mary Ruth McGinn's class at Stedwick Elementary School in suburban Maryland has an intriguing second name and unique purpose. McGinn's nineteen third graders have formed an in-house troupe called the Fire Starters Kids Opera Company, and they've spent the past eight months writing, composing, producing, and rehearsing an original opera...

Tonight Smash will lose its plum NBC slot--Tuesday at 10--and while its future is unknown, the signs point to doom. It will be banished as of April 6 to the network's graveyard: Saturday at 9. This is sad since it's a highly original show which is clever and entertaining...

Angela Meade ruled the stage as Norma last Saturday in an alluring new production at Washington National Opera, and judging from the ovation after her first aria and the "bravas" at the finale, this singer will now add another glittering success to her list of plaudits. Since March...

"On Monday, the Vatican announced that the 85-year-old pontiff would begin posting messages on Twitter next week under the handle @pontifex, a term for pope that means bridge-builder in Latin...Asked whether the pope's posts would be infallible, Msgr. Claudio Maria Celli, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, laughed...

When Marquita Lister sings Serena in Boston Symphony Orchestra's Porgy and Bess this week, she will come full circle in a celebrated career whose seeds took root while she was an undergrad at Boston's New England Conservatory of Music. In those days the soprano dreamed of joining the other great...

When I read that Molly Smith, artistic director of Arena Stage, was going to produce The Music Man, I picked a date and bought advance tickets. I was not disappointed. The show opened in D.C. at the end of May, and Arena must have guessed it would be popular because...

Francesca Zambello ranks among the world's most prolific opera and musical theater directors. Revered for her fearless dramatic intensity since her Houston Grand Opera debut in 1984, she seems to move effortlessly from her role as artistic and general director of the Glimmerglass Festival in central New York, to her...

"Where do you get your ideas?" is a question writers often hear, and I've learned that pinpointing the source of my inspiration is not an exact science. But when it comes to my debut novel, The Voice I Just Heard, I was stunned by the death of one young soldier...

ABC executives have been mostly mum about the late-season arrival of James Purefoy, the hunky British actor who joins the cast of Revenge as the show returns from hiatus on April 18.

It was announced in January that Purefoy would portray Dominik Wright, the mysterious old flame of the...

Frank Langella's Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women As I Knew Them offers shrewd and often poignant observations that linger in the mind long after each chapter ends--and there are 66 vignettes to savor. Published this week by Harper Collins, Langella's memoir is a tour-de-force debut that, in the...

In his role as showrunner for HBO's Boardwalk Empire, Terence Winter usually gets a fast response from any agent he calls. This was not the case in 1990, however, when he was 29 and trying to break into television. As a newly minted lawyer, a Brooklyn native transplanted to L.A.,...

Is it possible to live in a city and never see its most famous landmark?

I spent 11 years in the former mill town of Cohoes, whose namesake is the Cohoes Falls, the second most powerful waterfall in New York State. But when I was coming of age in...

HBO's Terence Winter loves to dazzle viewers with plots that take both surprising and truthful turns. "Storyteller" should be Winter's middle name, and as executive producer, head writer, and creator of Boardwalk Empire, his commitment to narrative integrity fuels the show's success.

Winter has reason to feel proud because...

"Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago."

It's my favorite opening in fiction, the first two lines of Truman Capote's A Christmas Memory (1956), which I return to each December the way someone else might revisit O'Henry's The Gift of...

When Louise Nayer was four in 1954, she and her parents and her six-year-old sister Anne took their first family vacation, traveling from their Manhattan apartment to a Cape Cod rental cottage. Tragedy soon struck when Nayer's physician-father and nurse-educator mother tried to light a gas water heater that exploded....

There's a new leading man in town--Canada's Paul Gross--who's appearing in the New York revival of Private Lives. Noel Coward's timeless comedy opened last week at the Music Box Theatre, and if you have the privilege of seeing Gross's long-awaited Broadway debut, you'll enjoy a nuanced, charismatic star turn. Acclaimed...

Patricia Racette, a soprano renowned for her vocal radiance and skilled acting, returns to Washington National Opera this Saturday as the company launches its first season under the aegis of the Kennedy Center. Making her local debut as Tosca, Racette will portray...

The Wolf Trap Opera Company was one of the first young artist programs in the nation and has always ranked among the best. Founded in 1971, Wolf Trap Opera gives emerging singers both performing experience and mentoring to help them transition from college or conservatory training to their professional careers....