Morris himself played both Dido and the Sorceress in the first performances, demonstrating his performing prowess as well as striking a blow for sexual transference. After he stopped dancing, he assigned the dual role to a male and a female dancer for alternate performances. Without his stellar presence, the dual casting puts an anachronistic post-Freudian interpretation on the story. Dido as a closet villain doesn’t seem to occur to either Purcell or classical mythology.
On Wednesday in Boston, Amber Darragh played the Queen majestically and the Sorceress with malicious raunchiness. At one point she had to switch from one character to the other almost without leaving the stage, but I saw her transformation immediately.
Related:
Altar and ego, Grand finales, Modern romantics, More 
- Altar and ego
Mark Morris’s Dido and Aeneas
- Grand finales
Jeffrey Rink has just ended his 18th and final season as music director of Chorus pro Musica. He’ll be missed.
- Modern romantics
Romeo & Juliet, On Motifs of Shakespeare is less of a statement than a supposition: what if we did it a different way?
- Us, writ large
Mark Morris’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato is a dance as big as its name, as big as its illustrious associates and enablers, George Frideric Handel, John Milton, William Blake, and a contemporary galaxy of dancers, musicians, and designers.
- Lightweights
Two of Boston’s major dance series wound up their 2006–2007 season last week with low-calorie desserts.
- Maestro!
Next week, the Celebrity Series of Boston brings back Mark Morris’s dance setting of Henry Purcell’s 17th-century English opera Dido and Aeneas .
- Hit and miss
Boston Ballet didn’t need Mark Morris’s blessing in 1999, and it doesn’t need it now.
- Mostly Mark
Mark Morris has worked with the Mostly Mozart Festival before, but this year’s commission from the 40-year-old summer music series posed a large-scale challenge, a full evening of new work.
- Craig Smith (1947–2007)
For more than 30 years, Emmanuel Music has been central to the cultural life of Boston.
- Measure for measure
“Great Ball at the Court of France,” which Ensemble Doulce Mémoire presented at the First Congregational Church in Cambridge last Friday, under the auspices of the Boston Early Music Festival, was a reminder that classical music used to be all about two popular forms, song and dance.
- Double or nothing
The American premiere of Dido took place here in Boston, at the Majestic Theatre in June 1989.
- Less
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Dance
, Entertainment, Dance, Performing Arts, More
, Entertainment, Dance, Performing Arts, Mark Morris, Dance Reviews, Craig Biesecker, Henry Purcell, Lauren Grant, Noah Vinson, Elisa Clark, Less
