The Threepenny Opera proclaims itself "an opera for beggars," and it was in fact an attempt both to satirize traditional opera and operetta and to create a new kind of musical theater based on the theories of two young German artists, composer Kurt Weill and poet-playwright Bert Brecht. The show opens with a mock-Baroque overture, a nod to Threepenny's source, The Beggar's Opera, a brilliantly successful parody of Handel's operas written by John Gay in 1728. In a brief prologue following the overture, a shabby figure comes onstage with a barrel organ and launches into a song chronicling the crimes of the notorious bandit and womanizer Macheath, "Mack the Knife." The setting is a fair in Soho (London), just before Queen Victoria's coronation. In this production, Weill champion HK Gruber led the Ensemble Modern in a performance of Weill's complete original score, the first time it had been heard in Germany in many years. This production was broadcast on German television (3sat).
Kristine Opolais is the young woman whose conflicting desires for love and luxury lead to her tragic end, and Roberto Alagna plays the man who falls for her in Puccini’s early hit.
A commuter waits for a ride under the sweltering Manila heat. As his impatience grows, he sets off on his walk home, putting on a pair of earphones as he begins listening to some music.
An anthology of four abbreviated operas: "William Tell" by Rossini, "The Marriage of Figaro" by Mozart, "Don Pasquale" by Donizetti, and "Carmen" by Bizet.
St. Margarethen is a magnificent structure and a grand setting for Nabucco. This venue, along with the gorgeous costumes, spectacular lighting, lasers and pyrotechnics made for one grand, five star production! This is reason enough to see it and it must be an advantage to view it on DVD.
A dead woman wanders through the shadowy space between memory and reality, tracing the lines of her identity through the land she once walked—an immigrant in death as in life.
Two erotic tales. In "Sexual Fantasies OF the Great Outdoors," Marilyn stalks her male "prey" and introduces us to a sexy phantom hitchhiker, a natural bathing beauty, and two luscious lesbian boating babes.
Enraged at the slaughter of Murron, his new bride and childhood love, Scottish warrior William Wallace slays a platoon of the local English lord's soldiers.
In 1943 Malmö, 15-year-old Stig is attracted to his teacher Viola, 22 years his senior, who, drawn to his youth and innocence, believes the lad is a God-sent relief from her miserable marriage to a drunken, unfaithful lout.
Tom Styles is a lonely production assistant to a Hollywood producer who, though a case of mistaken identity with his boss, gets caught up in a very complicated drug deal.
The ambitious young Ina Littmann is an investigative journalist for the TV talk show "Eye in Eye". Her current subject is Henry Kupfer, who wrote a bestseller about a psychopathic killer after he was himself in prison for 8 years for manslaughter.
