Another sloe-eyed vamp
“Since its 1987 premiere, this Franco Zeffirelli production has transitioned from breathtaking to tasteless to endearingly camp.” [JJ in NYP]
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Dynasty+dim sum=epic opera review lulz. Which is to say awfully amusing.
Hey maybe we could have someone do Turadot as a drama of Old (Aztec) Mexico, with a female priestess threatening to knife the hearts out of people. Wouldn’t that be nifty?
Or better yet, because cheaper, do it as a mafioso being quizzed by an FBI interrogatress in a room with lie detectors, etc., etc.,…..bare rooms, steel furniture, you know, really cheap…
Cieca, you left out “Someone’s mother”
Oh! Jezz I am wetting my excited pants trying to remember who this Saturday afternoon matinee’ film vamp is in the photograph, adorned with all that clunk dime store jewelery. Bored out of her wits, waiting for some hero to finally grab and thrill her at the final fade out. Is it Dottie Lamour,out of a sarong for a change ?
“Ann Murray and Meredith Arwady will sing the role of the Marquise de Berkenfield in La Fille du Régiment, replacing Felicity Palmer who has withdrawn from the run for personal reasons. Ann Murray will sing the performances on February 6, 10, and 13 matinee, and Meredith Arwady those on February 16, 19, and 22.”
Fine news about Murray, a real ‘trouper’– but wasn’t Della Jones available for the other performances? Of course this role demands a British or Commonwealth singer to honour the bel canto legacy of Monica Sinclair.
Harry:
ellerviera(2#): An ‘Aztec’ Turandot…. ? The ideal cast that could have been…..Well I am first to think of casting Yma Sumac as Liu. What a sensational performance we would have had.
La Cieca; Lovely Yvonne D’Carlo!..One of the first matinee’ I attended as a kid… was seeing her in Slave Girl with lots of foreign legionnaires. All I remember is some clown turning up a flame brazer in a tent of all things, trying to make her talk. (Perhaps they had fire proof tents!) I once talked to a guy that said he slept in ‘her bed’…..What he then explained and was meaning : he slept in the same hotel room …and the hotel bed, she had vacated the previous day.
Gee Vicar(6#)…you have outdone yourself , this time….mentioning Della Jones -the wobbling squawker for all ages. Just how many recordings he has wrecked with her ‘contributions’. The opera Beatrice Cenci is just one example. Do you want more?
Funny – you can tell the category A) opera-slash-broadway mavens in here from the category B) pure-opera ones!
Yes, it’s Yvonne DeCarlo – and the reason is because the headline (and the tags) is/are a quote from the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies” – from the song Yvonne made famous, “I’m Still Here.”
“First, you’re another sloe-eyed vamp, then someone’s mother, then you’re camp….then you career from career to career…” I THINK the next line is “I’m almost through my memoirs, but I’m here” but I can’t remember for sure.
Which is why #4 Baritenor said “you left out someone’s mother.” He’s category A.
Meanwhile, Vicar – isn’t Gillian Knight dead? I swear she was in the original cast of Pirates of Penzance as Ruth, wasn’t she?
(Actually, I know she wasn’t – don’t jump on me – I believe she did do one or more of the D’Oyly Carte revival recordings, though.)
And La Cieca’s obviously category A, also!
I know very little of Della Jones but the bits of her that I heard from the recording of Alcina were just lovely.
JJ: I wonder what has made the production “breathtaking to tasteless to endearingly camp” — the different people in charge of staging revivals? The context? Or JJ’s own personal response?
Yes, figaroindy, that is the next line.
I think I heard D’Carlo claim that Sondheim
wrote the lyrics for “I’m Still Here” based on D’Carlo’s career ups and downs. She certainly
started as a “sloe eyed vamp” and I don’t know if she ever played a mother but after doing the Munsters by 1970 was sure “camp”
I saw the original Broadway Follies production but was pretty clueless about WTF was going on with the show. I was too young and I didn’t get it at all . I don’t remember much, mostly how great Alexis Smith still looked.
Since then I “got” the idea and saw 4 other productions of it. My favorite was the very elaborate Mackintosh production in London which I saw two years in a row.
The production from the Papermill Playhouse was supposed to transfer to Broadway a while back but never did. I saw it in a little dinner theater in Des Plains, Ill back when it first went on tour, with, I think, Alexis Smith. That was where I also saw King And I with Patricia Morrison, and Mame with Jane Russell. I was such a gay little boy.
!0. Stuff and nonsense. “Della Jones Sings Donizetti” shows her to be the finest exponent of this sort of thing since Our Own Janet Coster.
This diva looks like that diva … Yvonne de Carlo and Catherine Zeta Jones.
Richard; I also believe that the character of Bobby in Company was based on a real life personal friend of Sondheim. A chap who was an airline steward actually called Bobby B…..!
Jeepers , have I spat chips- when I have seen productions of it (by its direction) , that ‘pulled punches’ trying to avoid the obvious why Bobbie’s ‘not getting married’.
Confession time: I actually know and enjoy the work of many of the singers the Vicar keeps promoting. I got into opera through a love of Gilbert and Sullivan (well, Musical Theater, then Gilbert and Sullivan, then Opera), so the first opera singers I knew were British G&S singers like Gillian Knight or Donald Adams, or British singers who, though primarily opera singers, recorded plenty of G&S, like Elizabeth Harwood, Della Jones and Monica Sinclair (both of whom I happen to love). So while the Vicar can get annoying, I see where he’s coming from.
Oh, and by the way, figaroindy, Gillian Knight never recorded Ruth for the D’Oyly Carte (she did record Little Buttercup, The Duchess of Plaza Toro, The Fairy Queen, Lady Jane and Dame Hannah for them), but there is a DVD of her Ruth from BBC television (with Peter Allen, of all people, as the Pirate King.)
Janet Coster, on the other hand…ick.
Coster is a fine London girl who ( alongside Veasey, Johnson, Guy and Finnie) stands among the finest Ebolis of the postwar period.
Surely, Vicar, Ann Murray, being Irish, is also an unworthy replacement for Felicity Palmer?
A Boy and His Diva (misfiled in the archives under “I am divine! I am oblivion!”) makes for interesting reading. It almost feels like a series on queer opera history could be revived. Man, those were the days!
If the Vicar could tell us why such-and-such British singer were appropriate to a role or as a replacement for whosit, then I’d find him less annoying. But since all he does is drop a name and run, I presume he is just milking his joke with no interest in informing or discussing. BORING. That’s just MO.