As the Houston Grand Opera Orchestra unleashes its prelude to Giuseppe Verdi's "Rigoletto," the title character appears, his back to the audience, striking a series of twisted poses. The sequence ...

In context, these words are ironic, even painful. But we have to get there first. Rigoletto tells the story of a hunchbacked court jester of the same name (Malcolm MacKenzie) and his daughter, Gilda ...

Rigoletto, the title character of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera, is a court jester with hyperkyphosis, aka a hunchback. I don’t know if I’m technically a hunchback, but I do slouch a lot, and I’ve started to ...

Carmen, Mimi, Norma, Tosca, Violetta, Cio-Cio-San, Medea, Liù, Aida, Lulu: Being an opera heroine is harrowing work. For hundreds of years, opera's women have ...

There's a simple but inspired piece of staging in the San Francisco Opera's "Rigoletto," the 1851 Verdi masterwork that opened Saturday at the War Memorial Opera House. A father has just guessed the ...

Verdi's operas are often the stuff of big emotions and thunderous clashes. But also they play well on a more intimate scale, as Opera San José's gripping production of "Rigoletto" clearly demonstrates ...

When we last encountered “Rigoletto” at Lyric Opera, back in 2000, bad-boy director Christopher Alden had turned the work into a heavy-breathing screed about 19th -Century male-chauvinist subjugation ...

Rigoletto. The very name of the main character makes many audience members at the Santa Fe Opera sigh with sympathy for the tragic fate of the court jester in the mid-nineteenth-century masterpiece ...

Act One begins in the palace of the Duke of Mantua, where the Duke himself is holding court. He's a self-obsessed cad, notorious for his indiscreet love life. We also meet the Duke's acid-tongued ...