Nothing more fun on a scorching summer day that a friendly game of “Name that Opera.” Below you’ll find two photographs from a recent production of a familiar opera. Can you name the opera? (Bonus: who’s the director?)
(P.S. — no fair “guessing” if you know the answer from having seen the production or reviews of it!)
Our publisher JJ (so recently browned out in Queens) expresses his thoughts on the Lincoln Center Festival’s Grendel in his Gay City News review. La Cieca herself picks up the slack on the podcast desk with her presentation of the second act of Maria Stuarda on Unnatural Acts of Opera. Meanwhile, the endlessly inventive Billyboy ups the ante of gay sensibility when he imagines Judy Garland, Bernadette Peters, Carol Channing, Gollum and darling Roger Darling as the cast of an iconic 1980s sitcom — part of the most recent episode of The Entertainment Beat with Frances Gumm.
Oh, and this is something La Cieca just discovered on YouTube. When you think “adorably cute Rossini tenor,” your first thought is Juan Diego Florez, of course. But here’s someone to give you second thoughts: Maxim Mironov!
La Cieca rushes back into blackout-torn Queens, New York to podcast Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, starring Barbara Frittoli and Anna Caterina Antonacci. Unnatural Acts of Opera.
The place: the Metropolitan Opera.
The time: October 2008.
The event: a cult diva’s return to the Met after a 24-season absence.
The hint: what’s my name again?
The mystery is solved, and, as usual, La Cieca predicted it well ahead of the official announcement. Per the Met’s website, David Daniels will sing the four performances of the new Orfeo ed Euridice production in May 2007.
David joins a distinguished group of artists who have interpreted the role of Orfeo at the Met, including Louise Homer, Kerstin Thorborg, Risë Stevens, Grace Bumbry and Marilyn Horne. The revival of Orfeo will mark the Met’s first performances of the opera since 1972.
The Met’s website notes that the production is dedicated to the memory of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.
Here are the results of La Cieca’s informal and utterly unscientific poll of her readers, asking “Who should replace Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in the Met’s production of Orfeo?” As you can see, a large plurality favored Ewa Podles, with David Daniels and Susan Graham also receiving numerous votes.
Through her usual impeccable and top-secret sources, La Cieca has managed to obtain some obviously bootlegged but fascinating video of the opera Grendel, as performed at the Lincoln Center Festival earlier this week. The video quality is only fair, but clip does depict some of the masterful puppet design by Julie Taymor.
This is what makes conductors wake up screaming. From a performance of Madama Butterfly, Philadelphia, February 1967, with Montserrat Caballe in the title role, and Richard Karp doing what he can to keep things together in the pit. The trainwreck.
(La Cieca likes to think of this excerpt as the “Berio Completion” of Butterfly.)
Cher Public