Jay Harvey Upstage

On credible authority, it's known that Wolfgang Mozart never used the middle name "Amadeus," except in a few jocular epistolary signatures. Yet, as play and movie, "Amadeus" is an indelible part of the sainted Austrian composer's identity. W.A. Mozart death mask "Amadeus" also plays with the age-old drama about the last act of Mozart's truncated span of life on the planet. How he died at 36, and how much he anticipated his demise in his Requiem's  composition (mysteriously commissioned, completed by a pupil), the nature of his fatal illness, his financial situation — all have been the focus of speculation and competing narratives since December 1791. Even his burial in what was once tut-tutted as a pauper's grave has been overinterpreted as a slight, when it followed in fact an imperial directive to simplify Viennese burial practices. Certainly, the abrupt ending of a career of genius right after the creation of pieces like the ...

Oscar and Ben Hubbard pay attention to their sister, Regina. The weight of the Southern past is palpable throughout Opera Theatre of St. Louis '  production of "Regina," the estimable yet somewhat obscure opera by Marc Blitzstein closely based upon "The Little Foxes," Lillian Hellman's corrosive drama of an Alabama family torn apart by greed and aggressiveness. Allen Moyer's set is dominated by a huge, idyllic view of a plantation home, set in an ornate gilded frame and leaning against the back wall. It looks like a staid print, with the pale colors of aquatint. Associated with the genteel life at Lionnet, the engraving is addressed directly by the uprooted Southern belle Birdie Hubbard. She is unhappily married to Oscar Hubbard, the junior member of an unholy trio of ambitious siblings. Otherwise the image is largely ignored by the family, occasional visitors, and the household's domestic help. What's important now is mandated by Regina,...

Final moments: Violetta and Alfredo. Time has allowed the scandal of Giuseppe Verdi's use of contemporary material and setting in "La Traviata" to mellow toward a more freely situated milieu and the kind of symbolic treatment that the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis gives the work in its new production. If it had debuted as a movie, the story of the consumptive courtesan redeemed, betrayed, then finally redeemed by love would be marketed as "based on a true story." For the legendary figure of Marie Duplessis, the toast of haut-monde Paris for a few brief years in the 19th century, haunts "La Traviata" completely. Similarly, she haunted the infatuated Alexandre Dumas the younger, among many others, in his La dame aux camellias , the play that inspired Verdi to make an opera out of a modern story. In her directorial debut, the veteran soprano Patricia Racette has updated the 1853 opera to the 1930s without doing violation to it. We might wonder ...

Irish citizens demonstrate in favor of repealing the Eighth Amendment. The overwhelming vote two days ago to repeal a constitutional amendment banning abortion indicated how much Ireland has changed. You don't have to go back to 1905, when James Joyce wrote "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," to be aware of the tumultuous changes. But I have done so out of admiration for the story — my first encounter with "Dubliners" more than 50 years ago. I've kept some of the names and lines of dialogue, the conversational phrasing, and the general structure of the story, modernizing the situation but attempting to show some continuity between the early manhood of Ireland's most illustrious 20th-century author and (from what I read) the Ireland of today. The computer screen in the darkened room stuttered and stalled, loading, loading, under the anxious eyes of Repeal advocates gathered to assess the chances of their cause a few days hence. Old Jack, his rheumy...