The Grosses Festspielhaus will welcome Richard Strauss's "Frau Ohne Schatten" and Janacek's "Vec Makropoulos," the latter conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen and staged by the controversial theater director Christoph Marthaler, who has become a favorite of opera house directors.
A controversial theater piece that explores the alleged persecution of Russia's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community under President Vladimir Putin is gearing up for a hotly-anticipated New York debut.
It starts with the Catalan ensemble La Fura dels Baus and continues on to often controversial theater-makers like Daniel Kramer and Rupert Goold, as well as to Katie Mitchell and Deborah Warner, two long-established stage directors who some while back got seduced into doing opera.
That approach is a bit controversial among theater academicians.
The use of the swastika is not the first controversial piece of theater Madonna has employed on her tour to promote "MDNA," her current album.
Ms. Paulus is a celebrated and somewhat controversial figure in theater: Her previous Broadway shows, "Hair" (2009) and "The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess" (2012), won the Tonys for best musical revival, and "Pippin" is the favorite for best musical revival this time around.
Twentieth Century Fox, which passed on a chance to release the controversial movie in theaters, has been wooing pastors at 260,000 churches to buy the movie in bulk and targeting more than six million Christian households with e-mail messages.
And surely playwrights courageous enough to tackle such controversial material deserve a theater courageous enough not to postpone their play when it proves to be precisely as controversial as they must have known it would be when they accepted it.
"Our goal is to make it the fun-est festival on the planet, so over-the-top is always our goal," said Mr. League, who gained national fame this summer when his theater's controversial "Don't talk or text" P.S.A. went viral.
One hundred and thirty hostages died; most in the controversial storming of the theater by Russian security forces.
For this season, he looked for something special to cap things off and his artistic team suggested Leonard Bernstein's controversial 1971 MASS: A Theater Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers that contemplates text from different religions.
