Looking through my photos of the Lucernaire from the past few years, I see that sometime between 2014 and 2019 the wording over the entrance was changed. It used to read Centre national d’art et d’essai (National center for art and experimentation), but now it just reads Théâtre Lucernaire. This Read More …
Besançon’s municipal theater was designed in 1775 by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, the architect who also built (for example) the Rotonde de la Villette in Paris. In an age when most theaters were horseshoe shaped, which meant that many of the seats offered little or no view of the stage — La Read More …
With seats for 570 spectators in its main auditorium, the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet is the smallest lyric theater in Paris. The nearby Garnier Opera seats three times as many people, and the Bastille Opera seats well over four times as many. Though the entrance to the Athénée is tucked away Read More …
This state-of-the-art 21st century theater was inaugurated on January 19, 2002 with a performance of the opera La traviata, by Giuseppe Verdi, and for the next three years this was Milan’s main opera venue while the historic Teatro alla Scala was being restored and restructured. In fact, the Teatro degli Read More …
In addition to the Arena, the ancient Romans had a smaller theater on the other side of the Adige River in Verona, with stone steps built into a hillside. This theater was excavated and reconstructed in the nineteenth century and is used today for spoken drama — especially Shakespeare in Read More …
Meiningen is a small city in southern Thüringen which advertises itself as “The Theater City.” It has an impressive theater building with six Corinthian columns, dating from the year 1909, and a unique theater tradition going back to the middle of the 19th century. From 1866 to 1914 Meiningen was Read More …
Not far from the Hegel House is the cleverly-named Renitenztheater, a cabaret theater that was founded in 1961. To understand the name, you have to know that lots of German towns have something called a Residenztheater, meaning the former official court theater at the Residence of the local duke, prince, Read More …
My only disappointment with Molière’s L’Avare (The Miser) was that it doesn’t include a maid. In all the other Molière plays I have seen or read, there is a clever maid who has the funniest lines and helps prevent the daughter of the house from being married off to some older Read More …
At the Münster City Theater I also saw a play: Unter Eis (Under Ice) by Falk Richter, a German playwright who also stages operas — he was the stage director for a Frankfurt production of Elektra, by Richard Strauss, for example. The play Unter Eis is about consultants, people who Read More …
The Théâtre des Nouveautés (Theater of Novelties or News or Innovations) is one of the many theaters along the Grands Boulevards in Paris. Most of these theaters specialize in contemporary French comedies, which are notoriously difficult for us poor foreigners to understand, even those of us who have some acquaintance Read More …