The Hours NYC Reviews and Tickets
Show-Score Member Reviews (23)
See it if you want to see a magnificent new opera with ravishing music and ravishing singing, terrific staging, and an engrossing story. A rare event!
Don't see it if you don’t like modern opera, although this is mostly in a late romantic style, tonal with lush harmonies. Following 3 stories can be tricky Read more
See it if you're into lyrically soaring and emotional music, penetrating choral singing and great dancing, supporting a complex operatic narrative.
Don't see it if you find it hard to follow what's going on when there're many things happening on stage simultaneously, with overlapping times & characters.
See it if you want to see a masterful performance with 3 singing actresses with a great script and wonderful staging. Very ambitious and moving.
Don't see it if you like operas with arias you can hum or if you like happy stories. Many of the characters are depressed. Suicide is a subject in the plot. Read more
See it if It's like watching a series of dreams; sometimes it makes sense, other times it obsesses on tiny details or shifts focus repeatedly.
Don't see it if Opera sung in English isn't your jam, you don't want to have to follow 3 storylines, you'd prefer something less avant garde. Read more
See it if three great divas sharing a stage, a complex story told cogently through 3 time periods, rich music, wonderful staging, great set
Don't see it if you're not familiar with Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway or the book The Hours, you feel nothing will compare to the film
See it if you enjoy stunning music performed by world-class artists. The visuals are also masterfully integrated throughout the story.
Don't see it if you are not a fan of opera or topics of depression and self-harm.
See it if New opera thrillingly sung and intricately acted, beautifully designed, brilliantly conducted, appeals.
Don't see it if opera without arias, without applause breaks, without conventional narrative, & full of symbolism & literary references - is not your thing. Read more
See it if Great fast paced and multifaceted story. Great twists. Superb performances.
Don't see it if you don't appreciate atonal music.
Critic Reviews (8)
This may sound lofty for an operatic adaptation, but the medium has a favorable condition: a large stage where time periods — and the specific individual emotions contained in them — share a temporal space. Owing to the staging by Phelim McDermott, this operatic version is resplendent in the emotions propelled by Kevin Puts's music and its three leading ladies.
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"Every scene in the opera eventually gets to the same place musically and dramatically, whipped into soaring emotion. The tear-jerking gets tiring."
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" Far from being a spinoff of a spinoff, Kevin Puts’s The Hours mixes musical freshness and venerable traditions in a fine and moving music drama."
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"Most of the opera’s action scenes revolve around Clarissa, and their lack of musical momentum reveals the opera’s principal flaw: It has well-crafted episodes and deft, imaginative transitions, but the story arc is carried by the libretto rather than the music."
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"At the end of “The Hours,” you will find yourself energized by Puts’s splendid shape-shifting score, or the triple threat of its leads, or the richness of this multilayered narrative."
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" 'The Hours is by no means an evening of light entertainment...if you can make it to the end, you hear a remarkable trio, when the three women finally come together in a musical room of their own. Sorrow has never sounded more beautiful."
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"The new opera 'The Hours' is wonderful in the most old-fashioned kind of way. Not only has it been written for a diva, the show is about a diva – and in this case, three of them."
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"Phelim McDermott’s production is brilliant in how it takes the libretto’s structure, Puts’ musical interpretation, and then layers it with a similarly vast theatrical palette. ... You can add 'The Hours' to the list of must-see operas this season."
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