The Vargas Blog

Tristan und Isolde might be Richard Wagner 's greatest work for the stage. A work inspired by the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer an...

  Mikhail Bakhtin , the great Russian literary critic, wrote that the novel as a literary genre is a series of carnivalesque episodes; essen...

I can't believe that WagnerOperas.com is twenty-two years old. Not to sound cliché about it, but it only seems like yesterday when I dec...

 I spent this weekend updating the Wagnerians page of the Wagneroperas site. Click here to go to the page, and take a listen to the new a...

  I imagine that after a notorious Meistersinger production by Katharina Wagner that brought to mind the dark days of National Socialism; ...

 In Jamie Lloyd' s minimal staging of Andrew Lloyd Webber 's Sunset Blvd ., based on Billy Wilder 's film noir, so much is left ...

 At a time when the popular sentiment seems to be to return plundered antiquities to the country from which they came; and as more and more ...

    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...