Live Opera Returns to South Shore

The Peabody- and Emmy-award winning series The Met: Live in HD returns to Marcus South Shore in Oak Creek Saturday with its second show of 2011, Nixon in China. 

The series performed at the historic Metropolitan Opera House in New York’s Lincoln Square. It allows for people across the country to be part of the audience for The Met’s acclaimed performances, but from the comfort of their nearby cineplex.

Last month’s offering, , was celebrating its 100-year anniversary on the stage, but Nixon in China is decidedly more modern. The Associated Press called it “perhaps the greatest American opera of the last quarter-century.”

First performed in 1987, the show is an in-depth exploration of President Richard Nixon’s trip to communist China in 1972 and his meeting with near-mythical leader Mao Zedong. The opera, which consists of three acts, focuses on both leaders and their influential wives, Pat Nixon and Jiang Qing, as well as their closest advisors, Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai.

The opera is filled with drastic set changes that transport the characters from Beijing Airport, to the fabled Great Hall of the People, to the more rural surrounding of the Chinese laborer. It is in these places that clashes of cultures ensue and the fates of both great countries prove to be decidedly distinct from one another.

Nixon in China is directed by its original composer, John Adams, and features the talents of Janis Kelly as the First Lady and acclaimed baritone James Maddalena in the titular role.

The show begins at noon Saturday and runs three hours, 40 minutes. Unlike last month's Met performance, Nixon in China is performed entirely in English.

Those who cannot make Saturday’s performance can still attend the encore presentation, scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. March 2.

Click here for more information on Nixon in China or The Met: Live in HD.