To boldly go where too many regies have gone before
Okay, La Cieca is finally ready to add another hard and fast “don’t” to her Rules for Stage Directors.
To wit: Even if a scene calls for something fantastical, and even if the mezzo doesn’t actually walk out of the production when she first sees the costume… if your imagery immediately and inevitably screams “Star Trek,” well… just don’t!
If you will avoid just this one little thing, O Regisseur, La Cieca promises she will not ask you why the company of Little House on the Prairie is playing host to Richard Tucker in cantorial garb.
If Emma Dante is 42 (published age), then I am a real Fakor.
I heard a rumor that a bottomless mezzo dressed as a pine cone is still a bottomless mezzo. Yick.
Isn’t she a hedgehog?
Our Doyenne winks at us as she affects a split infinitive in the headline.
So very sly is she.
If I close one eye, I could almost see the this scene in a Hayao Miyazaki light. O porcupine witch!
Cieca, this begs the question…
What are your other fast and hard Rules for Stage Directors?
It seems that the genius costume designer in this production of Ballo is one Arnaldo Pomodoro – who definitely deserves to have some pomodori thrown at him.
Pomodori putridi?
Ulrika als porcupine! Does this indicate that her clients come to her when they’re in sticky situations? Or that she has enough spine to tell people unpleasant truths? Or perhaps that she’ll use a quill to send warning notes?
Good lord, that Ulrica looks like the love child of a porcupine and Jabba the Hut!
Unless it is a Star-Trek-themed production of Don Giovanni where Giovanni is Kirk, Leporello is Spock, Donna Anna is Uhura, Donna Elvira is an Orion Slave Girl, Zerlina is Nurse Chapel, and Giovanni and the Commendatore fight with pon-farr-style Vulcan lirpas at the top of the show, which ultimately ends with Giovanni falling into the Guardian of Forever. In this case, please, by all means, use imagery that immediately and inevitably screams “Star Trek.”
Masetto is Sulu because he’s a bass. Ottavio can be Chekhov. Or a tribble. No one cares about Ottavio.
Ottavio is a wimp but he has the best music.
Wow, what a stimulating article, thanks so much for the link. I loved reading it, but I think his equation of Method = Emotional Truth and acting = lying is pretty facile. If a character’s emotional truth, as so often in Method movies, is a matter of feeling sorry for oneself, I’ll take a little pretending by the likes of Ronald Colman that can still take me to a higher plateau. But thanks again.
Sorry, this comment was meant to follow on Quanto’s entry at #5.