The Unpleasant Peasant
Or, what it would look like if Lucy Ricardo and the Wednesday Afternoon Fine Arts League did a production of La gioconda. (Actually the video is from the Liceu in 1978, but it does like the sets were paid for with a postdated check.)
so who’s singing??????
As if the mise en scene were not camp enough, the singers are Bruna Baglioni and Angeles Gulin.
I found out days ago that u can download most of the videos in google video. The good thing is u can download videos not only for PC or Mac, but for Ipod or PSP too!! i got some videos from parterre.com to my ipod. Hope Cieca u can post more vids in google video =)
haha la cieca u are too funny, i literally just watched those episodes of i love lucy two days ago with my mother (doesn’t get any queerer than that!)
Folks can someone enlighten me- I have seen several references to quote “the infamous Zambella? production of Lucia at the Met with Ms Devia. Why is this particular production so criticised – would someone be so kind as to put me in the picture please- some gossip doesn’t travel as far down here. Was it her- the production or the sets? I would love to know, thanks in advance.
The joke is of course how crappy it looks (forget the sets, Gioconda’s costume looks like what old ladies where to go square dancing in) and how great it sounds. Restraint and taste are totally overrated when it comes to (especially Italian) opera and these gals do belt it out god bless ‘em.
“what old ladies where to go square dancing in”
and by ‘where’, I mean ‘wear’.
Hi Daniel-
The production was done for June Anderson when she was the flavor at the time. It was all dark and swords, spears, etc were all red. What I think people forget is that June was amazing!!! She did well with it! Her Edgardo was Ricky Leech, I believe. The next year Devia and Jerry Hadley did it. I love Devia!!!! She looks like she is about 3 foot six onstage but that VOICE!
Anyway, at the opening night cutain call, Zambello was booed and she looked at the audience and laughed and walked off the stage.
I saw Lucia the previous year in Chicago also with La June and while she was dynamite, the production was one big turntable. Do any of you Chicagoans remember that? I would be remiss if I did not mention that Edgardo was shared that year between Alfredo Kraus and a very svelte Marcello Giordani. (I would have stabbed Arturo too!!!)
Completely off topic, but I’m desperate to know…
My husband and I are ripping/burning the Threepenny Opera original cast album (25 cents at the local library sale. John Astin, Bea Arthur, and the incomparable Lotte Lenya — can life get better?)
Anyway, does anyone remember a PBS Kurt Weill special in which a woman with short blond hair, wearing the most fabulous gown on earth (red sequins, with a gold-sequined double-helix down the front) sang “XXXX Would Have her Way”? Does anyone know who she was? Or where the song came from? Its actual title? I’ve tried to find it on the web and I’m stumped.
I did love Angeles Gulin — the Met foolishly gave her Vespri when she would have been ideal in Forza — or Gioconda. She sounds splendid here.
Daniel — Zambello wrote her own new story for Lucia and never bothered to tell anyone in the audience what it was. Weirdness went on all night, and none of it had anything to do with the opera we all knew and loved. June was amazing (I never heard her when she was not impressive — you should have heard her Elvira Walton and Cleopatra and Antonia at NYCO in her 20s — and her Trovatore Leonora as recently as 1998, a model of how to sing that awkward part) and she performed the Mad Scene while walking backwards down an enormous hill of coffins. But I think it was the rostrum emerging from a trapdoor to display Arturo (while he sang his little Act II arietta) that brought the audience hoots out in force.