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It’s hard to exaggerate the sheer awfulness of Tom Tykwer’s “Das Licht,” the opening film of #Berlinale2025. open.substack.com/pub/unrealc/...

Tom Tykwer’s “Das Licht,” which opens #Berlinale2025 tonight is a bloated, inchoate & breathtakingly bad film about a dysfunctional German family that employs a Syrian refugee as a housekeeper. It feels like 30 different films rolled into one-all of them terrible! Did I mention it’s also a musical?

From the absurd to the sublime. My week began with the fiasco of seeing Calixto Bieito’s dreary Rheingold @operadeparis without a viable Wotan (Iain Paterson was sick and there was no cover). 2 days later, Pierre Audi‘s spellbinding Götterdämmerung @lamonnaiedemunt exceeded my wildest expectations!

RIP to the avant-garde American theater legend, Richard Foreman. When I was 16, I went to see "Now That Communism Is Dead, My Life Feels Empty!" at the Ontological-Hysteric. 24 years later, it remains the most invigoratingly bonkers thing I've ever seen on a New York stage.

‘tis the season

Tonight: the fourth & final performance of Herbert Wernicke’s stunning staging of Pfitzner’s “Palestrina,” back at Wiener Staatsoper after 17 years. It’s one of the genius director‘s few productions still in rep. Let’s pray it returns, along with his Met “Frau ohne Schatten,” which wraps up Thurs.

I finally saw Klaus Mäkelä conduct, after years of only hearing about the Wunderkind. This weekend, the 28-year-old Finn made his Wiener Philharmoniker debut with an incisive & insightful performance of Mahler’s sprawling 6th symphony, a fiendishly difficult work that has bested many a maestro.

Mass at the stunningly restored Nôtre Dame de Paris.

LUNDI 9 DÉCEMBRE 2024
17h45

Vêpres de l'Immaculée Conception de la bienheureuse Vierge Marie.

Maîtrise Nôtre-Dame de Paris
Chœur d'adultes
Direction: Henri Chalet
Orgue de chœur: Yves Castagnet
Grand orgue: Olivier Latry

#paris #notredame

The enthusiastic curtain call for Lucia Bihler's ghoulish and offbeat production of "The Lobster," the season-opener at the Münchner Volkstheater, based on Yorgos Lanthimos's 2015 cult film.

www.muenchner-volkstheater.de/programm/sch...