starkers scheite schichtet mir dort
Need you ask who discusses the subject of nudity in opera (among other performing arts) in today’s Times?
[W]hen nudity seems called for and natural, it can lend disarming humanity to a drama.
There was, for example, Richard Greenberg’s “Take Me Out,†at the Public Theater in 2002, about a superstar baseball player who reveals that he is gay. The play could not have explored how the interpersonal dynamics of baseball’s locker-room culture are shaken by the star’s announcement without showing the players in the clubhouse showers.
. . . . Already in previews at the Broadhurst Theater on Broadway is Peter Shaffer’s “Equus,†a new production from London of the 1973 play. Naturally, fans of the young Daniel Radcliffe will be enticed by the chance to see him, our adorable Harry Potter, in the buff.
La Cieca kids, of course, because Tony Tommasini would never stoop to conscious lasciviousness. In fact, in the current screed, our scribe remains relentlessly high-minded in his rehashing of 1960s cliches about how “when nudity seems called for and natural, it can lend disarming humanity to a drama.”
Your doyenne should add here that, though she’s no Biblical scholar, she is shocked that Mr. Tommasini should be laboring under the misapprehension that the Gospels of Mark and Matthew are part of the Old Testament.
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That was the most RIDICULOUS remark. Come on!”
Um, really? Because it makes perfect sense to me, especially in that period of dress. You’re telling me that Anna would have taken off dress, corset, underskirts, and various other accoutrements in the course of a rape? She would do everything she could to keep her clothes ON.
Not ridiculous in the slightest, and is only made ridiculous by the laziness of the regie.
I find nothing ridiculous in the apt remark about the prescriptes of a different time, or the furtive sex remark- nothing silly other than Joesy pathetic attempt to irritate our doyenne.
Set your alarm cock, er, clock, drearie, you’ll have ot be up much earlier, and then no one will care. This is Cieca’s realm.
Got it.?
Peter Ackroyd claims in his slatest book on Shakespeare (though I don’t know what he bases it on) that in Elizabethan times people kept quite a bit of clothing on becasue the sight of scars, wobbly bits, dirty bits, and diseased bits would have put participants off.
I may have to lie down…
The first total nudity I ever saw on the opera stage – not sure of the year – 1972? – was Carol Neblett’s Poppaea at the New York City Opera. Long before Bumbry became the first nude Salome.
Take Me Out was a lousy play pretending to be about a subject it never even approached; without the nude scene they’d never have sold the tickets, and yet the only scenes that were written at all well were the monologues of Denis O’Hare as a fag accountant who has just discovered baseball. Clearly these were the only moments that resonated with the playwright’s own experience.
If an opera singer has to take her/his clothes off to express sex, s/he can’t be much of a singer. Isn’t that right, Mr. Gunn?
“….Donna Anna’s account of the pre-curtain encounter specifies that Don Giovanni advanced no farther in his nefarious purpose than embracing her tightly….”
True, but there is also the question over how much of the truth she is actually revealing to Don Ottavio during this conversation – a spring-off point for many interesting directorial concepts regarding the psychology of Donna Anna…
There’s also the ambiguity of ‘ma riconobbi poi che un’inganno era il mio’ which, in my interpretation at least, suggests a little more than a handshake.
All that stuff about did-she-didn’t-she in the darkened room is post-Mozartian self-indulgence. The whole thing is most powerful if Anna is youthful, and a victim of attempted rape. Deborah Warner put that point across very powerfully at Glyndebourne. It’s a male-chauvinist point of view, surely, to say ‘she was gagging for it, actually’.
I remember a production of Salome a year or two ago: where instead of doing her dance, Salome follicked with Herod and played with illuminated red globe balls. The twit of a director had then employed a group of male and female ‘naked extras’ to run around in flapping open overcoats or strip off; and some to tightly embrace and ‘shag’ in various clenches.
All this activity was a display of Strauss’ Dance of the ‘wiggling willies’. I suspect to distact from the lousy singers, and rat shit atrocious mod production. It was little better than a cheap sleazy XXX peep show basement cinema show. And we were warned ‘the production would be ‘shocking’???!!
Perhaps to someone’s 90 year old grandmother who
saw a production of Salome back in 1958 with Joan Hammond.
THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD…ARE YOU READING ABOUT ONE OF YOUR FAVORITE SINGERS?
Good Joan H., not the most athletic performers on stage by that period, danced her seven veils dance fully clothed and excited the senses of the ‘good taste’ audience…. by discarding progressively each of seven little different coloured hankies, tucked in the belt of her dress!(This, was told to me by one of her fellow performers in the production)
Another time back in the 80′s, there was a production of Samson & Deliah. Naked creatures crawling up and down a well lit huge cobweb of ropes upstage. Unfortunely one male got too close to the leg of a fellow female artist. His ‘member’ got ‘highly warmed up’ as a result, so to speak. The female got a little terrified / embarrassed / or startled …. tried to quickly retreat away from his apppendage. The audience noticed this disturbing distraction,and turned their full attention to the new temperory ‘rising star’ of the opera. To hell with the music, or the operatic stars singing the actual opera!
Then there was a recent case of a 60 or so, year old ‘duck’ soprano who will remain nameless. Who went nude for a bath scene in a Handel opera…it is like paying to purve through the Porkie’s keyhole to the locker-rooms; at some elderly womens’ afternoon swimming event!!!!
Scara- I don’t think anyone in this conversation has said that, have they?