The good professor Willard Spiegelman, whose prose graces the “print product” every month, went to the theater over the weekend and had a less than glowing impression of the Winspear when used for that purpose:
Does anyone else out there think that the superb Winspear Opera House is an absolutely terrible place for a play? I just got back from a performance of August: Osage County. I happen to have liked the play, the performance, the production, but the setting was horrible. I began by sitting in the Dress Circle. You can see nothing from there, even if you are sitting dead center on the first row. Because the house was no more than one-third filled, I moved down to the orchestra for the second and third acts. The viewing was marginally better, but there was  no sense of intimacy. A concert hall with 2,400 seats should not be used for the staging of plays. Period. And the body miking — which should never be used in a place that is acoustically solid — amplified the players’ voices in entirely unnatural ways. Let’s go back to the Kalita Humphries Theater, please.
