Manolo blah nixed
“Important warning: Covent Garden is marketing this as a family show for Christmas, but please don’t think of taking the children – they’ll be bored rigid and never want to go anywhere near an opera again.”
With The Tsarina’s Slippers Francesca Zambello‘s nonstop string of successes just keeps on stringing along! [Telegraph]
It looks like those folks should just save their money take their children to The Nutcracker.
Now that’s one really ugly photo!
Yawn.
The Tsarina’s Flipflops,I left at the interval and went to the pub.
Any good reviews that you see, ignore them, they know fuck all.
Zambello [i]thinks[/i] she can be a regular theater pro with a popular touch (see also: [i]The Little Mermaid[/i]); but she really, really can’t.
And I forgot what kind of HTML brackets we use here; sorry.
It’s better that way. Now I’ll always type “Zambello [i]thinks[/i]” instead of the less descriptive alternative.
Well I think it’s a beautiful score, and just because the the tunes aren’t world-famous like ‘Nutcracker’ doesn’t mean there aren’t any. Reviewers can tend to be deaf to unfamiliarity. Problem is, it’s not dramatic and the genre is tedious: all those comic peasants and faux-folksiness. ENO did Rimsky’s version of the same story ‘Christmas Eve’ ages ago – about 20 years – and that just about got away with it as it has a stronger second half, and it had a Pountney production that was deliriously spectacular – but these are operas for the theatre of the mind.
More to the point, when is someone going to rumble Zambello? Mediocre Mediocre Mediocre. Toujours mediocre. How the %$#@ do these people get work? Does she bullwhip them? (more than likely)
Yes Queen A, it IS an enchanting score and it could be done well with a bit of taste and imagination, qualities you don’t expect from Zambello. She gets work at the ROH because the opera director there “discovered” her – at least for Europe – when she ran the Wexford Festival. This is her third flop at Covent Garden, after Queen of Spades and Carmen, but the contracts apparently keep coming. We all hoped The Little Mermaid would make her a millionaire and we’d seen the last of her with Carmen.
If I hadn’t watched Sex and the City then I would never have figured out the title of this post because I’m not into women’s fashion at all. Still, it’s clever.
This is an enchanting productiom amd I loved every minute. Some people have no soul!