The Vargas Blog

    The last time the Metropolitan Opera presented Giuseppe Verdi 's titanic opera La Forza del Destino it was the 1970's: a decad...

When the Osage people find oil in their newly acquired land, hungry, greedy wolves come prowling in the guise of white cattle barons: white ...

My Mahler fall continues. Let me explain. No sooner did autumn start turning leaves a myriad of seasonal colors, and the weather bid goodbye...

 On the 19th of June, 1877 British pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge made a series of photographs of the race horse Sallie Gardner...

For Sarah Bernhardt , the great actress of the turn of the century, playwright Victorien Sardou wrote the melodrama La Tosca in 1887.  Fro...

  When the 2021-2022 MET season was announced, this revival of Patrice Chéreau 's production of Richard Strauss 's Elektra immediat...

In the new film The Batman , Gotham City is an amalgamation of 1970's urban blight New York City with surreal touches of London and Chic...

 Yes, Broadway has been back for a while, stumbling out of the COVID-19 nightmare in spurts. But this afternoon was MY first time back insid...

The problem with Bartlett Sher is that he is a gifted theater director, but those same creative gifts don't materialize when he dons hi...

I was there. Well, not exactly there, because Licorice Pizza , Paul Thomas Anderson 's latest film is so SoCal that even its title, the ...

I knew one day we would all have to go through this. The once young, vibrant enfant terrible of the Broadway stage, the one who dazzled us w...

The month of November saw the Metropolitan Opera stage a revival of their 30 year-old production of Richard Wagner 's Die Meistersinger...

With his latest film, Parallel Mothers ( Madres Paralelas ) Pedro Almodóvar comes back to the world of feminine relations, a landscape he...

With his familiar tongue-in-cheek deadpan that makes Buster Keaton appear like a loquacious lady at a garden party, Wes Anderson brings us...

 After a long time not posting on this blog, I am glad to say that I am back. Many things happened during that time. There were deaths in th...

Bayreuth 2020 has been canceled due to COVID-19, but music will continue over the Internet.  Below is the complete schedule of the alter...

With the COVID-19 pandemic raging around the country, and all sorts of sports having to take a back seat to health and safe hygiene requir...

Ennio Morricone , the composer of 400 film scores among them The Good, The Bad and the Ugly , Once Upon a Time in America , Once Upon a Ti...

Today would have been the first day of Spain's annual celebration of men (and women) with balls big enough to run in front of a pack o...