Clear the decks, clear the tracks!
La Cieca hears that Patti Lupone will make her role debut as Mama Rose in Gypsy next summer at the Ravinia Festival. La Lupone has previously graced the festival’s Sondheim series with her performances of Desiree Armfelt, Fosca, Mrs. Lovett and Cora Hoover Hoople. In the future — perhaps Joanne in Company?
UPDATE: La Lupone muses on the definition of diva in an interview with Newsweek.
Anyone see the new Sweeney Todd? Lupone with a tuba and mini skirt! I can’t wait.
I’ll never get over missing her in Anything Goes way back when … I was such a young queer then …
I missed it too! And I actually was in NY when it was up! Mind you, I had flown to NY to see one of Rysanek’s last Sieglindes so I was still giving my parents plenty to worry about.
May I say that LuPone was magnificent in Anything Goes. I saw it and I didn’t really know what it was all about. But I absolutely was taken in by her….and being a person who has seen lotsa opera and lotsa broadway that is saying a mouthful
I was lucky enough to see her in the “Anything Goes” production.
And even more fortunate to see her later one-woman concert show on Broadway. At one point in the show, she made some comment about the microphone, and then said (and I paraphrase very loosely), “Microphones? Who needs microphones? I don’t really need a microphone, do I?” And she put the microphone down (audience applause) and started belting out like Merman (lots of applause). At the end of the number, she got a standing ovation.
It was as if the audience wanted the Good Old Days again. and she was willing to give it to them for a few songs.
And is it time for a thread about how this applies to opera?
Who was the first opera singer to go out onstage wearing a body mike
(or mic?)in a production?
What was the first company to put body mikes/mics on most of the singers?
Don’t many companies now use body mikes/mics but deny it vehemently?
Is the NYCO the only company to have the “sound enhancement” system for the entire auditorium?
I know Sarah Caldwell use to use amplification as the movie theatre they performed in in Boston had awful acoustics.