Match in the Gas Tank
Blog
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Modern Match: Ariodante & Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
Baroque opera, especially Handel opera, prioritizes beautiful melodic singing while relying on emotion to carry the plot. The convoluted schemes, mistaken identities, and star-crossed lovers of Ariodante are connected by a series of heart-wrenching arias – moments when the plot pauses to allow the audience to engage their empathy. Modern television shows like Glee and Smash also use music to express… Read more
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Modern Match: La traviata & Princess Diana
In La traviata, Violetta Valéry is a contradictory, polarizing character. She’s spirited, independent, and socially savvy, but she invites others’ judgment due to her profession. She inspires admiration and scorn, pity and distaste. Some find her threatening; to others, she’s enchanting. Characters like Violetta endure due to their ability to capture the imagination of many generations.… Read more
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Modern Match: Elektra & Netflix Dramas
Spend enough time watching Netflix and, sooner enough, it starts to recommend content using what can only be described as mind-reading. Television shows featuring a strong female lead? Sign me up! Political/revenge dramas? I’m hooked! But to binge-watch something – to invest time and emotions in a story – it must have the greatest actors,… Read more
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Modern Match: Cendrillon and Chance the Rapper
What makes Cinderella’s story so captivating story for so many? Is it the magic and glamour of fairy godmothers and pumpkin carriages? Is it the rags-to-riches premise that everyone secretly wishes they could live themselves? Indeed the most admirable trait of Cinderella –a. k. a. Cendrillon in Massenet’s opera – is her maintenance of her… Read more
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Modern Match: Il trovatore & Harry Potter
The hero of Il trovatore, Manrico, is introduced in the opera as an adult, but the mystery of his character can only be unlocked when we understand what occurred during his infancy. In this and other ways, he’s similar to another boy we know well: Harry Potter. Manrico was raised never knowing his true family, including… Read more
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Modern Match: Siegfried & Neil Gaiman
Despite the millennia that separate the two, Wagner turned to ancient folktales as source material for his Ring cycle. Today, if the contemporary success of writer Neil Gaiman is any indication, we’re still gripped by mythology. Gaiman borrows from folktales, recontextualizing characters, symbols, and tropes in his fiction — Stardust, American Gods – and in Norse Mythology. In the introduction… Read more
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Modern Match: La boheme & Millennials
Living in the city, following their dreams, falling in and out of love, all while barely scraping by: this is the reality of life for the main characters in La bohème, but also for today’s Millennials. The modern Millennial is seen on TV shows like How I Met Your Mother, Broad City, Shameless, and more. These shows spin vivid… Read more
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The 5 Books I’d Like To Share with my Daughter (if I had one)
The past twenty-plus years of reading have seen my tastes change from children’s literature to teen novels to dense assigned readings in college, and now, anything that captures my imagination. Even to this day, I can look back on books I read as a child and remember what it was like to read it for… Read more
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Trying Mandolin: How I found myself in a weird place last Friday night
So… Let’s talk about last Friday night. On any given Friday, you can usually find me in one of two places: Curled up in bed catching up on my Netflix shows, or… Out at bar with my friends Fridays are a great time to get out of my workweek headspace. There are no emails or… Read more
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Review of “Faust” at Lyric Opera
Note: Written on February 21 after the Faust dress rehearsal Open up a Tolkien novel, and in the first few pages you’ll find one of the author’s famous maps, sketches of the invented world of Middle Earth. These maps are Tolkien’s attempts to make concrete places and people that have never existed. Continue to read… Read more
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Unbranded Content
Dad likes to tell me stories about growing up on a farm. I did not grow up on a farm. I grew up firmly in the suburbs, where the roads are paved, driving ages are enforced, and wearing cowboy boots to class is considered a fashion faux-pas. The farm stories to me feel like the… Read more
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Poulenc’s “Dialogues of the Carmelites” and the Grip of the Absurd
It is hard to explain to people the power of opera if they just haven’t… you know… had one of “those” moments.
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The Art of Facebook and Changing for the Better
It is nearly two o’clock in the morning on the night before I return to school for my final semester of my undergraduate degree. I have nearly fifty tabs open on my computer, most of them applications to such-and-such job or internship, maybe even a half-finished email to Professor So-and-So. But I’m not looking at… Read more
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Love and Tikka Masala
I believe Liz Lemon once said “Love is patient, love is kind. Love is gross, and sometimes weird.” I say that love is watching my boyfriend eat a slice of pecan pie before letting him kiss me. Love is letting him kiss me even though we both know that I have an allergy to nuts.… Read more
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A Perfect Communication
When I think of Sojin, I think of sunbeams. I think of watching the sun-illuminated dust fly from the strings at the force of my breath, and of seeing my distorted reflection wrinkle its nose in an effort not to sneeze. I think of everyday in the mid-afternoon when the sun was in just the… Read more
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In Honor of Jane Mitchell’s 90th Birthday
I took a selfie with my grandmother today. I held the phone in front of our faces and our images were filtered through its tiny lens, digitally encoded, and displayed back to us on the screen. I took a selfie with my grandmother and the only thing she could say at the sight of herself… Read more
Meg Huskin 