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April 28, 2008
Contents- Wine Tasting at the historic Siebenbaum Building
- Volunteers Needed!
- First the Documentary, Now the Opera
Wine Tasting at the historic Siebenbaum Building
For 12 at 7 pm, Friday, May 30
$45 per person
Ritch Sorgen & Marlies Egberding (PTFF Board member) will host a wine tasting for twelve at the historic Siebenbaum building in downtown Port Townsend. Each wine will be paired with a selection of hors 'd'oeuvres. Known for their elegant dinners and receptions, your hosts will provide a convivial evening in one of Port Townsend's seldom seen historic downtown buildings.
Reservations can be made for this special event by emailing terry@ptfilmfest.com.
Please indicate how many places at $45 each you wish to reserve for each party.
It's never too early to add one's name to the list of 300+ volunteers who fuel this energy-guzzling engine we call a film festival. We need all kinds and types, shapes and sizes, queen bees and worker bees. We need muscle and we need brain power. We need leaders and followers, young and old, professionals and amateurs, drivers and gofers, hosts and ambassadors, the computer-literate and the computer-challenged.
You can sign up by coming to the office where you'll be given a form to complete, or, if you're wired (or even wireless), by going to "Volunteering."*
* Yes, sorry to say, you need to sign up again this year even if you've signed up for every previous festival. For insurance purposes we need all applications to be current.
First the Documentary, Now the Opera
At the eighth annual Port Townsend Film Festival, we were pleased to screen a documentary, Wonders Are Many, about the creation and staging of a contemporary opera by John Adams based on the life of Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called father of the atomic bomb.
Although our audience wasn't vast in numbers, the film drew an enthusiastic response. As Robert Koehler noted in Variety:
Art and science form a combustible fusion in Jon Else's elegant and wide-ranging "Wonders Are Many: The Making of Doctor Atomic." A dazzling case of the right filmmaker attached to the right subject, Else comprehensively captures the making of the 2005 San Francisco Opera world premiere of composer John Adams and director Peter Sellars' opera, "Doctor Atomic," on J. Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the first atomic bomb....
Since Oppenheimer never left behind diaries or an autobiography, his life remains an open book for interpreters, which Adams and Sellars eagerly would like to be. Originally intended to span Oppenheimer's entire career involving the bomb, which covered a number of year, Adams explains that the dramatic need to compress dictated that the narrative concentrate on the final two days in Los Alamos, New Mexico, leading to the 1945 test.
Now, the opera is being staged by the Metropolitan Opera for its 2008-2009 season, and will be highlighted as one of the HD Live Performances that will screen at the Rose Theatre. The MetOpera series, which has proven phenomenally successful, reading more than 900,000 new opera goers, will feature the new opera on its Saturday, November 8. Ticket information will be available at the Rose and its website as the fall season nears.
In the meantime, a DVD of Wonders Are Many is available DVD format in the PTFF film library and may be checked out by current members.