parterre box

“Ein Film, das Sie nie vergessen werden,” says the announcer, and this claim may very well be true. Presenting Das Lied der Balalaika, a 1971 attempt by “opera singer” Ivan Rebroff to cross over into… well, it’s difficult to define exactly the genre here. L’homme qui vient de la nuit (as the picture is entitled, even more confusingly, in French) is a musical; it’s a thriller; it’s a circus melodrama — sort of Yes, Giorgio meets The French Connection meets Berserk! And La Cieca is not even going to try to figure out what the smoking chimps are all about.  [...]

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You know, La Cieca and her alter ego JJ are just like the pair in that lovely song by Mr. Sondheim, “The Story of Lucy and Jessie.” Well, not just like, perhaps. La Cieca can hardly be accused of having “maturity and plenty of security” and dear JJ does not exactly boast “the purity along with the unsurety that comes with being only twenty-one.”  But, for the sake of the argument, let’s just say they see things in very different ways. 

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An opera quiz with the composer who’s been on everyone’s lips lately, Rufus Wainwright.

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In honor of our current series of Unnatural Acts of Opera featuring La forza del destino, La Cieca presents yet another vocal identification quiz. The aria is “Son giunta… Madre, pietosa Vergine” and your task is to identify the baker’s dozen of divas singing it. Just to shake things up, La Cieca has decided we should have the competition in the comments section. If you think you know the identities of our 13 Leonoras, list them in the correct order in a comment below. The first commenter to identify all 13 correctly wins a coveted Amazon.com Gift Card. (La Cieca’s [...]

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The first rule in writing an artist’s program bio is to find some interesting and unique detail that will catch the reader’s interest. This tidbit need not be directly relevant to the production at hand or even to the artist’s ostensible talent, so long as it’s, as the journalists like to say, “hooky.” Which is why La Cieca is simply beating herself up right now since this definitively hooky bio detail is already taken: “A self-confessed egomaniac, he once went blind while living in the Chelsea Hotel, New York, addicted to crystal meth.” [Times Online]

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