Entertainment
L.A. lost Yuval Sharon to Detroit. Here's what we're missing — and what we might win back
Ten years after founding the Industry, America’s most mind-changing opera company, Yuval Sharon in 2020 improbably accepted the role of artistic director of Michigan Opera Theatre. He now divides his time between sustaining the Industry in L.A. and disrupting opera in Detroit, where he changed the formerly conventional company’s name to Detroit Opera. But that’s not all that he divides.
Detroit still gets traditional opera in its traditional opera house, although imaginatively spruced up, like the time Sharon staged Puccini’s “La Bohème” backward (Acts 4, 3, 2 and 1 in that order). But he also takes opera entirely out of its comfort zone. This month Sharon chose the lovely but underused 400-seat Gem Theatre, around the corner from the grander Detroit Opera House, for a sensational new production of John Cage’s “Europeras 3 & 4,” an unpredictable cornucopia of run-of-the-mill opera refashioned through chance operations into an outright operatic circus.
A few days later, Sharon announced his next Industry innovation, “The Comet/Poppea,” slated for June at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary in L.A. Here Sharon will adapt Cage’s “Europera” principle — the allowance for all aspects of opera to unpredictably collide — with an epoch mashup juxtaposing scenes from Monteverdi’s 1643 “The Coronation of Poppea” with those from a newly commissioned experimental opera by George Lewis based on a 1920 science fiction short story by W.E.B. Du Bois.
Sharon has, in fact, been slowly taking up a Cagean operatic challenge. A dozen years ago, he startlingly staged a quasi-operatic interpretation of Cage’s 1970 “Song Books,” an almost-anything-goes theatrical endorsement of Thoreau’s call for anarchy that included the great opera star Jessye Norman. It was part of a San Francisco Symphony concert in which conductor Michael Tilson Thomas’ job was to make a smoothie.
In 2018, during Sharon’s three-year stint as artist-collaborator at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Sharon combined the orchestra’s resources with those of the Industry to mount Cage’s “Europeras 1 & 2,” originally written for Frankfurt Opera in 1987 and meant to deconstruct the full resources of a big opera company. To make it local, Sharon produced his “Europeras 1 & 2” on a Sony Pictures soundstage in Culver City, taking advantage of props and costumes from classic films.
Cage followed “Europeras 1 & 2” with a a pair of chamber operas for an avant-garde theater festival in London. Long Beach Opera is the only company in America to have attempted “Europeras 3 & 4.” A yet smaller-scaled fifth “Europera,” which is well suited for college music departments, gets around more and has been done several times since 2011 at Loyola Marymount University, making the Greater L.A. area the only place in the world where all five “Europeras” have been performed.
The “Europera” essence is the paying attention to what is, rather than belaboring relationships. Cage did not reimagine the past but simply accepted the fact that we are surrounded by old things and old music. There is nothing unusual about hearing an aria in your car and passing a building from another era. Does anyone think it odd to be sitting on a modern sofa while listening to a turntable housed in a 19th century hutch?
In all the “Europeras,” props, costumes, arias and movement, as well as entrances and exits, happen in arbitrary fashion. Singers are on their own. They sing whatever arias they like in the public domain, without regard to anything else around them. The audience is on its own as well. You pick out what you want to hear, see what catches your eye, focus your attention at will. “Europera” is your opera.
“Europera 3” employs six solo singers, two pianists playing tidbits from Liszt opera arrangements and a dozen 78-rpm turntables. “Europera 4” reduces the numbers to a mere pair of singers, a single piano and an antique record player. Sharon raided Detroit Opera’s storage rooms for costumes and props. He scoured local stores for old 78-rpm opera discs and borrowed a Victrola from a patron. The backdrop was a large projection of a digital clock.
Chaos was not the result. Instead, a listener was invited to home in on a forest of opera, noticing this or that — maybe you recognize it, maybe you don’t. But like nature, everything felt like it had a purpose, multiplicity a matter for celebration. The devotion of the six singers mesmerized.
For “Europera 4,” Sharon impressively enticed two stars, mezzo-soprano Susan Graham and bass-baritone Davóne Tines. Each has a stunning, polished stage presence and knows it. Cage might have preferred less showiness, but here they felt bigger than life, capable of moving a listener to tears.
The “Europeras” needed nothing more, but Sharon is a maximalist and pleasingly welcomed into the mix two dancers. Their presence became a reminder of just how much cooperation is needed. “Europeras” are an exercise in social interaction — all elements animate and inanimate, visual and aural, coexisting, each remaining true.
I attended a Friday night performance, the first of three. Sharon attracted the audience every American opera company lusts after, filling the Gem with what appeared to be an eager and open-minded mix of well-dressed opera patrons, new-music fans and curiosity seekers, along with a contingent of out-of-towners not wanting to miss history in the making. Both “Europeras” received excited standing ovations.
“Europeras” work as well as they do because Cage ingeniously set up strategies that focus our attention on the unexpected. Detroit’s “Europeras” worked as well as they did thanks to Sharon’s genius. He is famously the strategizing mastermind of “Hopscotch,” the 2015 opera staged around downtown L.A. with the audience riding in limos.
So maybe there was some cosmic sense to it all. That same Friday night while “Europeras 3 & 4” were being performed, Lewis, the composer of the upcoming “Comet,” was leading a public discussion with Christian Wolff on the latter’s 90th birthday at Judson Memorial Church in New York. Over more than seven decades, Wolff has been one of the most extraordinary strategist-composers in history. The teenage Wolff astonished Cage when he first studied with him in the early 1950s, becoming the youngest and now final surviving member of Cage’s legendary New York School of composers.
The following evening at Judson an arresting New York ensemble, String Noise, presented a birthday marathon concert at Judson in tribute to Wolff, who, along with being an immutable experimentalist, is a noted classical scholar who had a career as a professor at Harvard University and Dartmouth. His father, Kurt Wolff, was a famed publisher who worked with Kafka, Jung and a great many others.
Along with younger musicians who have avidly and brilliantly taken up Wolff’s music, the marathon included older Wolff colleagues, such as composer David Behrman, who performed on a laptop an incandescent electronic piece, “CW90,” written for the occasion.
Wolff’s music does not, for the most part, look back. It explores possibilities and does so with such rigor and invention that Cage often said he learned more from Wolff than Wolff did from him. The marathon covered the full range, beginning with the first piece Wolff showed Cage, “Duo for Violins,” from 1950. It explores a combination of three pitches. The material for Wolff’s newest score, “What If?,” which had its premiere at the concert, consists of 97 “mostly quite short items for use by from 2 to around 20 performers.” It is up to them to determine what, with whom and when.
Wolff has devoted his life to a study of the ancients. His musical heritage is unequaled by any composer today, in his connection to both the old and the new. And all of that has made him the living, questing embodiment of the musical question: What if? You never know what you’ll get, but I’ve never heard it fail to be arresting at the very least, At their best, Wolff’s what-ifs can be enlightening both sonically and, in the interaction of performers, socially.
In 1997, New York University, a Washington Square neighbor to Judson, published Stuart D. Hobbs’ “The End of the American Avant Garde” as the 37th volume in its “The American Social Experience Series.” The New York School shows up on page 165.
But what if just the opposite of this heedless obituary for the avant-garde is true? What if we are entering a new era led by the likes of Sharon? What if we can utilize history not with the superficial irony of postmodernism but allow the past to be the past — something that is part of us but not holding us back? What if we follow the example of Christian Wolff? That extraordinary weekend suggested we should.
In the meantime, stay tuned for “The Comet/Poppea.” And check out the website of Issue Project Room, the presenter of the Wolff 90th-birthday celebration. Recordings of the conversation with Lewis and the historic marathon concert will be made available once edited.
Movie Reviews
Roll On 18 Wheeler: Errol Sack’s ‘TRUCKER’ (2026) – Movie Review – PopHorror
I am a sucker for all those straight-to-video slasher movies from the 90’s; there was just a certain point where you knew the acting was terrible, however, it made you fall in love. I can definitely remember scanning the video store sections for all the different horror movies I could. All those movies had laughable names and boom mics accidentally getting in the frame. Trucker seems like a child of all those old dreams, because it is.
Let’s get into the review.
Synopsis
When a group of reckless teens cause an accident swroe to never speak of it. The father is reescued by a strange man. from the wreckage and nursed back to health by a mysterious old man. When the group agrees to visit the accident scene, they meet their match from a strange masked trucker and all his toys with revenge on his mind.
Roll on 18 Wheleer
Trucker is what you would imagine: a movie about a psychotic trucker chasing you. We have seen it many, many times. What makes the film so different is its homage to bad movies but good ideas. I don’t mean in a negative way. When you think of a slasher movie, it’s not very complicated; as a matter of fact, it takes five minutes to piece the film together. This is so simple and childlike, and I absolutely love it. Trucker gave us something a little different, not too gory, bad CGI fire, I mean, this is all we old schlock horror fans want. Trucker is the type of film that you expect from a Tubi Original, on speed. However, I would take this over any Tubi Original.
I found some parts that were definitely a shout-out to the slasher humor from all those movies. Another good point that made the film shine was the sets. I guess what I can say is the film is everything Joy Ride should have been. While most modern slashers are trying to recreate the 1980s, the film stands out with its love for those unloved 1990’s horror films. While most see Joyride, you are extremely mistaken, my friend; you will enjoy this film much more.

In The End
In the end, I enjoyed the entire film. At first, I saw it listed as an action thriller; I was pleasantly surprised, and Trucker pulled at my heart strings, enveloping me in its comfort from a long-forgotten time in horror. It’s a nostalgic blast for me, thinking back to that time, my friends, my youth, and finding my new home. Horror fans are split down the middle: from serial-killer clowns (my side) to elevated horror, where an artist paints a forty-thousand-year-old demon that chases them around an upper-class studio apartment. I say that a lot, but it’s the best way to describe some things.
The entire movie had me cheering while all the people I hated suffered dire consequences for their actions. It’s the same old story done in a way that we rabid fans could drool over, and it worked. In all the bad in the world today, and my only hope for the future is the soon-to-end Terrifier franchise. However, the direction was a recipe to succeed with 40+ year old horror fans like me. I see the film as a hope for tomorrow, leading us into a new era.
Trucker is set to release on March 10th, 2026
Entertainment
Review: In ‘American Classic,’ Kevin Kline and Laura Linney deliver a love letter to theater
The lovely, funny “American Classic,” premiering Sunday on MGM+, is a love letter to theater, community and community theater. Kevin Kline plays Richard Bean, a narcissistic stage actor. He’s famous enough to be opening on Broadway in “King Lear,” but he has to be pushed onstage and is forgetting lines. After he drunkenly assails a hostile New York Times critic — caught on video, of course — he’s suspended from the play, and his agent (Tony Shalhoub) advises him to get out of town and lay low until the heat’s off, as they used to say in the gangster movies.
Learning that his mother (Jane Alexander, acting royalty, in film clips) has died, Richard heads back to his small Pennsylvania hometown, where his family — all actors, like the Barrymores, but no longer acting — owns a once-celebrated theater. To Richard’s horror, it has, for want of income, become a dinner theater, hosting touring productions of “Nunsense” and “Forever Plaid” instead of the great stage works on which he cut his teeth.
Brother Jon (Jon Tenney), running the kitchen at the theater, is married to Kristen (Laura Linney), Richard’s onetime acting partner, who dated him before her marriage; now she’s the mayor. Their teenage daughter, Miranda (Nell Verlaque) — a name from Shakespeare — does want to act and move to New York, as her mother had before her, but is afraid to tell her parents. Richard’s father, Linus (Len Cariou), is suffering from dementia, though not to the point he won’t actively contribute to the action; every day he comes out again as gay.
Across the eight-episode series, things move from the ridiculous to the sublime. Richard’s attempt to stage his mother’s funeral, with her coffin being lowered from the ceiling, while “Also sprach Zarathustra” plays and smoke billows toward the audience, fortunately comes to naught; but he announces at the ceremony that he’ll direct a production of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play “Our Town” at the theater, to “restore the soul of this town.” (His big idea is to ignore Wilder’s stage directions, which ask for no curtain, no set and few props, with a “realistic version,” featuring a working soda fountain, rain effects and a horse.) Fate will have other plans for this, and not to give away what in any case should be obvious, the title of the play will also become its ethos, with a cast of amateurs, including Miranda’s jealous boyfriend, Randall (Ajay Friese), and ordinary people standing in for the ordinary people of Wilder’s Grover’s Corners.
The series has a comfortable, cushiony feeling; it’s the sort of show that could have been made as a film in the 1990s, and in which Kline could have starred as easily in his 40s as in his 70s; it has the same relation to reality as “Dave,” in which he played a good-hearted ordinary Joe who takes the place of a lookalike U.S. president. The town is essentially a sunny place, full of mostly sunny people, to all appearances, a typical comedy hamlet. But we’re told it’s distressed, and Mayor Kristen is in transactional cahoots with developer Connor Boyle (Billy Carter), who wants clearance to build a casino on the site of a landmark hotel. (Much of the plot is driven by money — needing it, trading for it, leaving it, losing it.) He also wants his heavily accented, bombshell Russian girlfriend, Nadia (Elise Kibler), to have a part in “Our Town.”
As in the great Canadian comedy “Slings & Arrows,” set at a Shakespeare Festival outside of Toronto, themes and moments and speeches from the play being performed are echoed in the lives of the performers, while the viewer experiences the double magic of watching a fine actor playing an actor playing a part. Kline, of course, is himself an American classic, with a long stage and screen career that encompasses classical drama, romantic and musical comedy and cartoon voiceovers; the series makes room for Richard to perform soliloquies from “Hamlet” and “Henry V,” parts Klein has played onstage. He brings out the sweetness latent in Richard. Linney, who played against her sweetheart image in “Ozark,” is happily back on less deadly ground (though she’s tense and drinks a little). Tenney, who was sweet and funny on “The Closer,” and who we don’t see enough of these days, is sweeter and funnier here, and gets to sing. (All the Beans will sing, except for Linus.)
As a comedy, it is often predicable — you know that things will work out, and some major plot points are as good as inevitable — but it’s the good sort of predictability, where you get what you came for, where you hear the words you want to hear, ones you could never have written yourself. “American Classic” is not out to challenge your world view in any way but wants only to confirm your feelings and in doing so amplify them. Shock effects are fine in their place — and to be sure there are major twists in the plot — but there is a certain release when the thing you’re ready to have happen, happens, whether it brings laughter or tears. Either is welcome.
Movie Reviews
‘Scream 7’ Review: Ghostface Trades His Metallic Knife for Plastic in Bloody Embarrassing Slasher Sequel
It’s funny how this film is marketed as the first Scream movie in IMAX, yet it’s their sloppiest work to date. Williamson accomplishes two decent kills. My praise goes to the prosthetic team and gore above anything else. The filmmaking is amateurish, lacking any of the tension build and innovation in set pieces like the Radio Silence or Craven entries. Many slasher sequences consist of terribly spliced editing and incomprehensible camera movement. There was a person at my screening asking if one of the Ghostfaces was killed. I responded, “Yeah, they were shot in the head; you just couldn’t see it because the filmmaking is so damn unintelligible.”
Really, Spyglass? This is the best you can do to “damage control” your series that was perfectly fine?
I’m getting comments from morons right now telling me that I’m biased for speaking “politically” about this movie. Fuck you! This poorly made, bland, and franchise-worst entry is a byproduct of political cowardice.
The production company was so adamant about silencing their outspoken star, who simply stated that she’s against the killing of Palestinian people by an evil totalitarian regime, that they deliberately fired her, conflating her comments to “anti-semintism,” when, and if you read what she said exactly, it wasn’t. Only to reconstruct the buildup made in her arc and settle on a nonsensical, manufactured, nostalgia-based slop fest to appeal to fans who lack genuine film taste in big 2026. To add insult to injury, this movie actively takes potshots at those predecessors, perhaps out of pettiness that Williamson didn’t pen them or a mean-spirited middle finger to the star the studio fired. Truly, fuck you. Take the Barrera aspect out of this, which is still impossible, and Scream 7 is a lazy, sloppy, ill-conceived, no-vision, enshittification of Scream and a bloody embarrassment to the franchise. It took a real, morally upright actress to make Ghostface’s knife go from metal to plastic.
FINAL STATEMENT
You either die a Scream or live long enough to see yourself become a Stab.
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