Live Via Satellite

Written By: Mary Adair Trumbly - Highlands PAC | Issue: 2019/01 - Winter

The Live via Satellite Series will continue throughout the winter at the Highlands Performing Arts Center. 

On January 5, join us at 1:00 P.M. as  The National Theatre of London  presents “Allelujah!  by Alan Bennett.  Twelve mature actors, playing patients encouraged to form a hospital choir, frequently totter into song-and-dance numbers. But there’s also a pitch-black plot twist, and a sharp injection of cynicism at the way Britain’s health service is being deliberately run into the ground.

At 12:55 P.M. January 12, the MET Opera will broadcast Cilea’s “Adriana Le Couvreur.”  For the first time at the Met, Anna Netrebko sings the title role of Adriana Lecouvreur, the great 18th-century actress in love with the military hero Maurizio, sung by tenor Piotr Beczała.  Gianandrea Noseda conducts Cilea’s tragedy, in a new staging by Sir David McVicar, with the action partially set in a working replica of a Baroque theater.

 The National Theatre will present “Antony & Cleopatra” at 1:00 P.M., January 19.  Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo play Shakespeare’s famous fated couple in his great tragedy of politics, passion, and power.  Caesar and his assassins are dead.  General Mark Antony now rules alongside his fellow defenders of Rome.  But at the fringes of a war-torn empire, the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra and Mark Antony have fallen fiercely in love.  In a tragic fight between devotion and duty, obsession becomes a catalyst for war.

At 12:55 P.M.  February 2, the MET Opera will broadcast Bizet’s “Carmen.”  Mezzo-soprano Clémentine Margaine is opera’s ultimate seductress, opposite tenor Roberto Alagna. Soprano Aleksandra Kurzak sings Micaëla alongside bass Alexander Vinogradov as the swaggering bullfighter Escamillo.

The National Theatre will present “I’m Not Running” at 1:00 P.M. February 9. This is an explosive new political drama exploring personal choices and their public consequences, written by Academy Award-nominated writer David Hare.  Pauline Gibson is a junior doctor, who becomes the face of a campaign to save her local hospital.  She’s thrust from being an angel of the National Health Service (NHS), to becoming an independent Member of Parliament.  In the Houses of Parliament, she crosses paths with her university boyfriend, Jack Gould, a stalwart Labor loyalist, climbing the ranks of the party.  As media and public pressure mounts on Pauline to run for leadership of the Labor party, she faces an agonizing decision…

All Live via Satellite Series screenings are on Saturdays.  Before the MET Opera screenings there will be a pre-opera discussion at 12:30 P.M.   Tickets are available at highlandspac.org., at the door, or by calling (828) 526-9047.  Highlands PAC is located at 507 Chestnut Street.