Water Street becomes Carthage’s rocky shore (and — surprise! — the surface of a distant planet). I’m just back from the Wooster Group’s production, at St Ann’s Warehouse in DUMBO, of Francesco Cavalli’s 1641 opera, La didone. My mother, clever as she can be, offered to take me for my birthday, and I [...]
Entries from March 2009
March 15, 2009
Ides of March
The big day for us haruspexes and other soothsayers!
Although Shakespeare does not tell us what prognosticatory technology was used by the Soothsayer who leapt forward to warn Caesar of the day’s danger, we are told, by Cicero and Suetonius, that it was indeed an Etruscan haruspex (they were always Etruscan), Spurinna, who interpreted the strange [...]
March 11, 2009
Glows
I have never seen so massively pink a sunset. Pink, a heated pink, suffused not only the west into which I was walking, but across to the north and east, glowing so rose in that corner that it was as though a second sun were setting. A pink scarf trailed across half the sky. And [...]
