The Vargas Blog

The following article appeared in the New York Times . It gives a brief impression of opening night of the 2005 Bayreuth Festival. Boos at...

The annual Bayreuth Festival opened today with a performance of Tristan und Isolde . The unusual new production (see pictures below) was con...

It's now been a little over 24 hours since the publication of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince , J.K. Rowling's latest trip to...

Wagner's concept of "total art work" was not something that he liked to share. Mozart and Verdi were fortunate to have had Lor...

Over the years, the Broadway musical has developed into two stylistic entities. At the risk of offending the buffs, one of these camps is oc...

The Light in the Piazza was the big winner at the Tony Awards this evening. The elegant, subtle musical about a Southern mother and daughte...

The day after I saw the play Doubt , I wrote to its author, John Patrick Shanley. (He includes his e-mail address in the Playbill, and urges...

The Tony Awards are being presented tonight at Radio City Music Hall, and will be telecast by CBS. This season I got to see three of the nom...

Last Saturday afternoon I tried, without much success, to get tickets to see Doubt . Unfortunately, all they had left were partial-view seat...

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was Edward Albee's first full-length play, his first play on Broadway, and surely the work for whic...

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang , one of the last big movie musicals written for the screen -- it opened in 1968!, is now the latest "film-turn...

I knew it was going to happen, and I called it at the end of my entry for April 8. As the winner of the Papal election, the former Cardinal ...

Finally, the awaited new Peter Sellars production of Tristan und Isolde premiered at the Bastille. The following is the New York Times revi...

The collaborative culmination between director Josef von Sternberg and superstar Marlene Dietrich ocurred in 1935 with the last film that th...

Thursday, April 7 was a long day's journey into night and beyond for me. I taught the entire day, and during the afternoon showed my Fil...

The production of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar , that is about to open at the Belasco, is a bloody and noisy reading of this vene...

Last Saturday, March 19, Symphony Space celebrated composer Stephen Sondheim's 75th birthday with a gigantic marathon of the composer...

On Saturday night, I went to the MET to hear my first Der Rosenkavalier . After almost thirty years of attending opera, I had never gone to ...

At the Berlin Staatsoper Unter den Linden, the new production of Parsifal , which premiered on March 19, was greeted with roars of boos from...