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Jon
with Mark Ringer and his wife Barbara Bosch in Cental Park waiting
to see a production of Tartuffe. Only moments after the photo
on the left was taken, the sky opened up and it poured rain. Fortunately,
the rain stopped at curtain time just long enough for the production
to take place. It started pouring again just as the curtain call
started.
Both
Mark and Barbara are successful directors who are frequent collaborators,
notably in an adaptation Mark wrote combining the two parts of Shakespeare's
Henry IV, with Mark playing Falstaff.
Mark's
books Opera's
First Master: The Musical Dramas of Claudio Monteverdi and
Electra
and the Empty Urn: Metatheater and Role Playing in Sophocles
are both available on amazon.com.
Of
the Monteverdi book, Alan Rich of the LA Weekly wrote ". .
. an uncommonly well-told accounting of Monteverdi’s operatic
legacy . . . Trying to write about any kind of abstraction -- music,
the visual arts, another writer’s style – should embody
the urge to send the reader back to the source; Ringer’s triumph
is that I sit here with my desk strewn with Monteverdi: L’Orfeo
on a Virgin-Veritas CD with Ian Bostridge, The Return of
Ulysses and The Coronation of Poppea in the René Jacobs
discs on Harmonia Mundi, half-a-dozen DVDs. His book brings them
marvelously to life, and by doing so recreates a marvelous era in
the arts. Whether I know the music already or not, his kind of writing
communicates a deep and honorable appetite for the music under his
enthusiastic examination. . . . remarkably vivid, informed –and,
I can well imagine, dedicated – writing . . . [an] exceptionally
valuable book."
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