home team
RogerEvansOnline reports that George Steel, executive director of Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, will be the new general director of the Dallas Opera. La Cieca would like to take a moment to recognize the “man bites dog” novelty angle of this story: Steel is not British.
Sorry Cocky, yes I realized you were – I was being – or attempting to be – ironic with the follow-up statements.
Mortier has not “taken over” at NYCO at all. He’s not even on the payroll and is quite busy with running a little regional company in Paris.
How can he possibly be blamed for the improvidence of others? It’s not up to him to take pity on us New Yorkers and somehow serve up what Henry Holland has felicitously called “shitty performances of The Mikado.”
Why are so many of us so avid for people (like Mortier, like Steel) to fail?
Sorry, but New York City Opera is not having a “season”. There are presenting ONE opera.
And if Mortier isn’t running the New York City Opera, who is? The press release about George Manahan starts with “New York City Opera General Manager-Designate Gerard Mortier is very pleased to announce that Maestro George Manahan…” Who’s will was it that the season be canceled and the State Theater gutted and renovated?
I’m not saying that what he might eventually won’t be fantastic. I hope it will be. But, if you didn’t go to their website, you would hardly know that they currently exist.
Moby Dick? Did someone say that there will be a world premiere of an opera based on Moby Dick? by Jake Heggie?
Now that could be interesting purely from the staging point of view. Will they do the scene at the beginning where QueeQueg f***s Ishmael? (This is before they embark on the doomed ocean journey, read the unabridged version).
I sense a vehicle for Nathan Gunn as Ishmael, but who will play Queequeg?
Why, Teddy Tahu Rhodes, of course! Who else would you like to see top nathan Gunn?
Or they could go another way, and get one of the tops from Treasure Island Video. Which somehow brings me back to “Penetrating Wagner’s Ring”.
You know, TTR and Nathan Gunn sort of inhabit the same space, so I don’t think that would really work. You’d need someone taller and bigger than NG for that role (also someone not so white and blonde as TTR).
Oh I know. Cieca’s favorite, Erwin Schrott, for Queequeg. Of course.
You boys are silly… yes… Moby Dick… and the only casting they have announced is in a different direction, at least physically than you have… Ahab will be Ben Heppner in his Dallas Opera debut.
I suppose that is reasonable.
Who’s gonna be the whale?
that is an off-stage, non=singing role.