 Opera for Movie Lovers
September 2007-July 2008 Sundays @ 11 am
All shows regular price/ $3 to Students and Seniors (62 and older) with current ID.
The Coolidge Corner Theatre and cultural partner Boston Lyric Opera are proud to present our second year of the popular six-event series of Opera-based films. All films are shown on the giant silver screen and some are preceded by live a mini-performance and/or introduction by professional opera educators. Light refreshments provided.
Mark your calendars to join us for this pleasurable tour of films featuring opera themes, classical and contemporary.
To purchase tickets, visit http://www.coolidge.org/divas.
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THE TURANADOT PROJECT
Sunday, March 16 @ 11:00 am in Moviehouse 1
When conductor Zubin Mehta decided to stage Puccini's Chinese opera 'Turandot', he remembered the Chinese film "Raise the Red Lantern," and sought the film's director. Zhang Yimou, (* the winner of our first Coolidge Award in 2004) who had never directed an opera before. Mehta and Zhang mount the production in the ancient Forbidden City in Beijing in a palace built in 1420. Music documentarian Alan Miller captures the backstage drama in this gorgeous film.
Zhang Yimou required Chinese period costumes (using a labor force of 2000), employed soldiers as extras, and cast a tiny female athlete in one of the roles. The Chinese costume manager learns how to assuage the demands of a trio of divas, as Westerners Sharon Sweet, Giovanna Casolla and Audrey Stottler rotate in the demanding title role. The film treats us to the amazingly different performances of these Turandots along with Calaf's aria performed by Lando Bartolini, Sergej Larin and Kristjan Johannsson and Liu's death scene in triplicate.
"The Turandot Project" is an engrossing account of a world event where beautiful, glorious music and theater unites East and West.
dir. Allan Miller, 1h32m, 2000 |
COSI
Sunday, May 4 @ 11:00 am in Moviehouse 1
Based on a play by Louis Nowra, COSI follows Lewis, a young, inexperienced university student jumps at the chance to stage Mozart's "Cosi Fan Tutte," except for one small detail--his actors are the residents of a psychiatric hospital. But the show must go on, even as the prima donna lead refuses to take direction and Lewis’s personal life falls apart. Through working with the patients, he eventually discovers a new side of himself which allows him to become emotionally involved, while anti-Vietnam war protests erupt in the streets outside.
dir. Mark Joffe, w/ Toni Collette, Ben Mendelsohn, Rachel Griffiths 1h37m, 1996 |
THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
Sunday, July 13 @ 11:00 am in Moviehouse 1
Erique Claudin, a violinist in the Paris Opera orchestra, suffers from arthritis and hopes to compensate for his loss of employment by selling his lifetime work, a piano concerto. With his anticipated profits, Erique wishes to continue paying for the voice-training of lovely Christine Dubois (Susanna Foster). When Erique goes to his potential publisher and is told that the manuscript has been rejected, and then hears it being played from another room, he assumes that his work has been stolen. Erique attacks and stangles the publisher, after which the latter's secretary throws acid in the composer's face. Clutching his seared flesh, Erique flees to the sewers and the sanctum beneath the Opera House.
dir. Arthur Lubin, 1h32m, w/ Nelson Eddy and Claude Rains, 1943 |
| This series is made possible by the Trust Family Foundation, in partnership with Finagle a Bagel. |
