Music/Theater

BABY BOOMERS: It’s 1982 in the TV studio for the trendy talk show “Hello, New York,” featuring art historian Heidi Holland (Rebecca Foresman), prominent New York pediatrician Dr. Peter Patrone (left, Tyler Weaks), and Scoop Rosenbaum (right, Shawn Fennell), editor of the influential Boomer magazine.

Women of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s: “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby?” “Heidi Chronicles,” PST Opening, Highlights Baby Boomer Angst

Donald Gilpin

The Heidi Chronicles, 1989 Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winner, is Wendy Wasserstein’s depiction of young Heidi Holland’s life from 1965 to 1989, as she charts Heidi’s tumultuous, troubled, often hilarious course through the early decades of the women’s movement. Heidi struggles to combine her career as an art historian and her personal life, as her chronicles take the audience on a baby boomer nostalgia trip rich in allusions, both musical — “The Shoop Shoop Song,” Janis Joplin, “White Rabbit,” Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” John Lennon’s “Imagine,” Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” — and historical — Bobby Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, Tricia Nixon, John Lennon, Ronald Reagan.

(Photo by David Newton-Dunn) ALLS WELL THAT ENDS WELL: Dalinda (left, Marcy Richardson), finally realizes she loves Lurcanio, (James Allbritten), and he is able to forgive her even though she duped his brother, Ariodante, into believing that he had been betrayed by his lover, Ginevra.

Princeton Festival’s Stage Set on Fire With G. F. Handel’s Opera “Ariodante”

Nancy Plum

Both of Princeton’s major opera companies had the potential for major changes this year. Opera New Jersey, which opens its season in a few weeks, had a major change of leadership when its founders left New Jersey to conquer new operatic mountains. Princeton Festival’s founder and Artistic Director Richard Tang Yuk also left New Jersey (to join the choral faculty at Indiana University) but has maintained his leadership role with the Festival, returning to Princeton this month to oversee the Festival’s multi-faceted summer of programming. Dr. Tang Yuk took the podium Saturday night to conduct the Festival’s premiere operatic offering: George Frederic Handel’s Ariodante. Ariodante dates from 1735, at the height of Handel’s operatic eminence, just before the composer turned his attention to oratorio. 18th century opera audiences had different tastes and attention spans than today; composers turned out lengthy operas based on epic Greek stories in which the simplest thought might elicit an eight minute da capo aria full of vocal fireworks. Handel’s Ariodante might have the length and Greek roots of that time period, but is full of the delicacy and charm of his music.