Music production

Music production

I consider myself somewhat of a Super Bowl halftime show expert: I don't know much about football, but I sure know a hell of a lot about musical icons, pop culture, and putting on a show. So, it's with those credentials that I hereby declare that Bad Bunny's halftime show at Super Bowl LX was one of the best ever, if not the very best of all time. There, I said it.

If City Center Encores! was originally founded as a kind of musical-theater seance devoted to raising the dead, or at least the long-forgotten then High Spirits is about as literal a mission statement as you could ask for. The rarely revived 1964 musical opens with a seance and arrives at City Center like a theatrical ghost itself: long unseen, mostly forgotten, and faintly glowing with the promise of pleasures from another era. That alone makes High Spirits worth summoning.

As a piece of theatre, it finds its flow. As a debate play, though, it gathers a locomotive energy as it travels towards the showdown between Frank Miller (James Doherty), who is returning to this dirty little village in the middle of nowhere, and the marshal Will Kane (Crudup) who put him behind bars. That is mostly because of the uncanny and urgent relevance of this 1952 film about a community working out (or rather, squirming out of) its civic responsibilities around institutional wrongdoing.

Mozart's opera The Magic Flute is long, running for about three hours, and possesses a famously convoluted plot, laden with esoteric philosophical concepts. It's very much a grown-up affair, but you wouldn't know it from Protein's simplified 75-minute dance-theatre adaptation, which is faithful to the original (well, mostly), highly entertaining and suitable for all ages. Certainly, the audience at the performance of Protein's The Magic Flute I attended at a packed The Place, an even mix of children and adults, appeared rapt throughout

"Conceptually a lot of the video was inspired by the themes of Tranquilizer itself, exploring themes of archiving and degradation," says Elliott. To create this heady balance of catalogued crumbing, Elliott and George devised a narrative surrounding a piece of software that's tasked with forecasting natural disasters, documenting and analysing values like wind speed and precipitation - "essentially a worst-case scenario machine", Elliot says.

Based on the 2005 movie starring Joel Edgerton and Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kinky Boots follows Charlie Price, the owner of a shoe factory in a small English town who tries to keep the family business afloat. Together, with the help of a local singer and drag queen named Lola, they create a line of fashionable, high-heeled boots. Directed by Jerry Mitchell, with a book by Harvey Fierstein and music and lyrics by none other than Cyndi Lauper, the musical debuted in 2012 and won six Tonys.

"T his building gets us closer to the people," says Portland Opera artistic director Alfrelynn Roberts. She's showing off the organization's new location, occupying three floors in downtown Portland's World Trade Center complex. After the 2024 sale of its longtime southeast home base, Portland Opera announced a strategic decision to move across the river in early 2025. Continued activation of downtown Portland is important to Portland Opera, and its new location makes them a nucleus.