By - 3 Mar 2011"With Trelise Cooper as costume designer, Xerxes should have been an overblown baroque folly. But it isn’t. The costumes, like the opera, are a balance of the ravishing and the refined."
read full article By - 3 Mar 2011"This 2011 production of Xerxes is the first professional staging of an opera by Handel in New Zealand. Handel wrote over 40 operas and was a major force in the precarious and difficult opera world of London. Xerxes first appeared at the Kings Theatre, Haymarket, in 1738."
read full article By - 3 Mar 2011"Heroes don't come much kookier than Xerxes. He may be the King of Persia but he opens Handel's opera by extolling the beauties of a plane tree; a man who, as one character comments, "is aroused by a rough trunk."
read full article By - 3 Mar 2011"This world premiere production is born out of a two and a half year gestation, during which commissioned English playwright Lennie James worked through a sequence of workshops and readings by the venerated Massive Company."
read full article By - 3 Mar 2011"NEIL Ieremia's latest production in collaboration with Black Grace UrbanYOUTHMovement opened Auckland Festival's 2011 dance programme last night in fine style, combining exuberant, disciplined high energy, technically demanding full-out dancing with in-your-face social commentary."
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