Best bets

NCPA Opera La Fille du Regiment

Date: March 14-18-7:30 pm

Venue: National Centre for the Performing Arts

Gaetano Donizetti is one of the representative masters of Italian operatic style in the first half of the 19th-century, along with Rossini and Bellini, considered the three giants of bel canto. La Fille du Regiment is the third produced by NCPA after Donizetti's L'elisir d'Amore and Don Pasquale. La Fille du Regiment (The Daughter of the Regiment) is an opera in two acts. The first tells the life of the female protagonist Marie in the army, and the second, her life in a castle. The opera premiered on Feb 11, 1840 at the Paris Opera, but its first performance in Italy on Oct 3, 1840 received harsh reviews and wasn't taken seriously. Not until 1928 did the opera receive its due accolades with the Italian soprano, Toti Dal Monte, in the role of Marie. The storyline is lighthearted, humorous in tone, and accessible to popular audiences. The music is richly-expressive, the male and female lead vocal elements each having their own unique styles. The aria "Ah! Mes amis, quel jour de fete!" dubbed "dangerous ground" for tenors, demands a full nine successive high Cs within two minutes, leaving many tenors daunted by the task. It was in fact Pavarotti's role in this very opera that had earned him the title, "King of the High C".

The Key Theater: When All Was Green in Shenzhen

Date: March 3-April1-10 am/3 pm

Venue: Nanshan Culture & Sports Center Micro Theater

Through old books, recycled bindings and yellowing pages a story is told about a boy and a tree, about childhood and adolescence, about fields that are lost between gray concrete and about one green bud of hope. The Key Theater was established in 1998, a collaboration between writer Dikla Katz and actor Avi Zlicha-graduates of Tel-Aviv University from the Film and TV and Theater departments respectively. As a theater for young audiences (TYA) that travels in Israel and abroad, they seek to reach audiences from different cultures and backgrounds and strive to create performances which will be artistic as well as thought-provoking. They seek to encourage curiosity and imagination and believe that by creating fantastic, nonrealistic children's theater we can make a basis for acquaintance and a wide understating of the place we are living in.