parterre box

27 comments

• figaroindy says:

  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?

  on October 30, 2009 at 1:04 PM
• figaroindy says:

  (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.)

  on October 30, 2009 at 1:05 PM
• figaroindy says:

  And La Cieca’s obviously category A, also!

  on October 30, 2009 at 1:05 PM
• kashania says:

  I know very little of Della Jones but the bits of her that I heard from the recording of Alcina were just lovely.

  on October 30, 2009 at 1:05 PM
• kashania says:

  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?

  on October 30, 2009 at 1:07 PM
• Sanford says:

  Yes, figaroindy, that is the next line.

  on October 30, 2009 at 1:20 PM
• richard says:

  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.

  on October 30, 2009 at 7:20 PM
• Sanford says:

  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.

  on October 30, 2009 at 7:32 PM
• The Vicar of John Wakefield says:

  !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.

  on October 30, 2009 at 7:44 PM
• MontyNostry says:

  This diva looks like that diva … Yvonne de Carlo and Catherine Zeta Jones.

  on October 30, 2009 at 7:55 PM