"This year, my favorite fully staged opera was Intermezzo's elegant low-budget version of Benjamin Britten's Curlew River."
-Lloyd Schwartz, The Boston Phoenix, December 20, 2006
BEYOND THE FRINGE
"Intermezzo wisely based this just-about-flawless production of Graham's original. Young stage director Andrew Ryker blocked the action with hieratic simplicity, even managing to suggest the opera's Japanese origins. At the end, the spirit of the dead child...sings from his grave to console his mother. It's one of Britten's most austere and moving works, and both the performance and the production lived up to it."
-Lloyd Schwartz, The Boston Phoenix, November 20, 2006
"Andrew Ryker's admirably direct staging updated the action to a post-World War II cafe in some imaginary offspring of France and Italy, and left ample room for comic business...It was an appealing dessert, airy and sweet as a cream puff."
-Matthew Guerrieri, The Boston Globe, May 15, 2007
"Andrew Ryker's clean, unobtrusive staging keeps the drama in focus."
-Matthew Guerrieri, The Boston Globe, September 17, 2007
THE INMAN DIARIES
"The opera stops there, feeling not like a tragedy but like a passing glance into something strange, a little repugnant, and yet...colorful and compelling."
-Kilian Melloy, The EDGE Boston, September 16, 2007
"Andrew Ryker's direction, naturalistic and efficient, made the judicious most of dramatic shifts..."
-Matthew Guerrieri, The Boston Globe, May 19, 2008
"Stage director Andrew Ryker kept the stage action flowing, and seasoned the lengthy, potentially static da capo arias with a number of gags and props, a la Peter Sellars. The audience got all the jokes, chuckling at just the right moments."
-Ed Tapper, The EDGE Boston, February 18, 2009