The Vargas Blog

Things are getting curiouser and curiouser at Bayreuth these days.  A little over 72 hours after bass-baritone Yevgeny Nikitin made an ex...

The Bayreuth Festival has announced that bass-baritone Samuel Youn will replace Yevgeny Nikitin in the title role of Der fliegende Holl...

Major controversy has erupted at the Bayreuth Festival mere days before opening night.  Russian bass baritone Yevgeny Nikitin , who was t...

So far, Bayreuth has not released any pictures from the new production of Der fliegende Holländer by Jan Philipp Gloger which will open...

When is an expected prequel not a prequel? When director Ridley Scott decides to revisit his classic 1979 film Alien .  The director is b...

When I was a grade school lad back in the late sixties and early seventies, I remember I used to hurry home from school to watch Dark Shad...

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau 's voice was one of my first operatic experiences.  Decca had repackaged the Sir Georg Solti Ring and was e...

The Metropolitan Opera will premiere its new Parsifal next season.  It is a production conceived by François Girard that just had its prem...

Ever since he broke the ban on encores at the Metropolitan Opera a few seasons ago in the new production of La Fille du Régiment, Juan Die...

The Metropolitan Opera announced this week its 2012-2013 lineup. It features exciting new productions, a totally new work, and a a good cr...

After being on the waiting list for about nine years, which of course felt more like nine centuries (there's an Italian bel canto line i...

Robert Lepage's Metropolitan Opera Ring of the Nibelung has finally come to a conclusion with the unveiling of Götterdämmerung , t...

It soon becomes clear as you watch the new American adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that director David Fincher is the perfe...

When Martin Scorsese 's point of departure for a film is personal, the result is always an outstanding movie. This is the case with Hug...

In a memorable scene from J Edgar , Clint Eastwood 's new biopic of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's first director, the youn...

I received the following press release this evening from the Film Society of Lincoln Center . The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced ...

I did not see all of the films that played at the 49th New York Film Festival , but I saw enough of them to be able to put together a top t...

When Mikhail Bakhtin writes about the polymorphously perverse and carnavalesque nature of the novel, the great Russian literary theorist co...

The Weinstein Company is back with another mid 20th century story set in England about a British royal and a commoner to rival last year...

Little remains of DOGME95 in the current films issuing from the mind of Danish film director Lars von Trier. In his latest, Melancholia ,...