Brits blow it again
A drag queen friend of La Cieca’s — long before she was La Cieca — used to have an expression she to describe the terminally inept. The queen would say, “That guy could screw up a blowjob.” By which she meant, of course, receiving a blowjob, i.e., just sitting there, or standing there or whatever.
And so it seems to be with Houston Grand Opera’s new production of the supposedly idiot-proof Tosca, as devised and executed by the All Albion All the Time team of John Caird and Bunny Christie.
According to critic William Albright:
For some reason there are gaping holes in the ceiling of all three… sets (a church, a room in a palace, a prison). Baron Scarpia seems to live or office in a storeroom piled high with wooden crates and augment his police chief’s salary by dealing in black market art objects and cases of wine. Caird’s Tosca doesn’t dramatically leap to her death from the prison roof, she stabs herself in the throat like Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, staggers a bit, and tumbles backward out an open window.
And every now and then a ghostly, barefoot little girl dressed in white appears onstage, apparently to symbolize death, fate, or something. Mostly she just seems to have wandered in from The Lovely Bones.
And pity poor Patricia Racette, whose role debut as Tosca was costumed in “a woefully drab gray ball gown with a huge caboose-like ruffle on the rump.”
Why, La Cieca asks, was the need felt to import a British team when there is an abundance of American directors who could have done just as lousy a job? Where, for example, were James Robinson and Mark Lamos?
The land of McDonald’s Happy Meals is also the land of Julia Child and Alice Waters; I’ll take Whitman and Dickinson up against Blake, and Trilling up against Orwell, any day; and there are far more dire things in American pop culture than The Simpsons (which at its best is quite as good as Monty Python’s Flying Circus) Now if you had said “the land of Glenn Beck and 24″, on the other hand…
Sorry for the outburst of cultural patriotism, but it had to be said.
Don’t be dissin’ Jack Bauer; he’ll break your fingers and make you date Kim!
There’s nothing wrong with 24. Action…. man! If one looks at ‘British crime shows’ their police are so, so, so politically correct, they are always trying to ‘pull the plum out of their arses’ and they drive ‘little granny cars’ in pursuit through their back lanes called streets. Perhas a larger more powerful vehicle would get jammed between the two sidewalks. Talk about…. comedy shows.
Speaking of British opera directors….
Olivier Tambosi was supposed to direct the LA Opera production of Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten; now Ian Judge is listed. Anyone here know why there was a change?
as he is known as the ‘poison dwarf’ in the profession, that seems a fabulously appropriate director choice for ‘Gezeichneten’…..
Love the comment about Judge.
What exactly has he done to earn that nickname? I’ve seen several of his productions in LA and liked all of them, especially the FIGARO.
Judge is a hateful little dwarf who enjoys terrorizing cast members if he can get away with it. He arrives to direct a production totally unprepared..preferring to make it up as he goes along and blaming soloists for not being able to read his twisted little mind.
This post will excite the wrath of our Vicar.
I am sure he has gathered up the hem of his vestments and is furiously getting buckets of water from the baptismal font to douse the flames.
I saw Houston’s TOSCA and, while I thought the singing and acting at least decent and occasionally inspired, the sets just seemed to me ugly. No worse than the Met’s new production (based on the HD telecast), but certainly no better. I too did not know what to make of the young blonde girl who appeared in each of the acts. In Act 1, I thought she was l’Attavanti, since she came in and stood before the Madonna praying, but then she shows up at the back of the stage in Act 2 after Tosca has murdered Scarpia, perched on top of one Scarpia’s piles of crates, lit like an angel glowering down at the deed. In Act 3, she sat in the window while the Shepherd Boy sang his song.
Racette gave a fine performance, as good as any other I’ve seen in the last two decades. You either like her voice or you don’t, I guess. I think she’s about one size too small, vocally, for the part, but she manages everything and never stints. Stabbing herself in the throat (exactly as she had stabbed Scarpia) and then falling backwards out the window didn’t work well.
Racette seems interested in the stabbing of self! The
past summer she ended “The Letter” in that manner; not
in the original play or score for the opera, she asked that
it be included as a proper ending. I find that interesting,
but am resisting talking with Dr Freud!
And I was at Carnegie Hall today for the concert. I forwarded La Cieca my thoughts… and a photo (though distant as I was sitting up in the rafters) of one of the fugliest concert gowns of all time.
It’s the dress she’s wearing on the cover of the ‘Coloraturas’ album, for the immediately curious.
Oh goodie, you wrote a review.
Who cares if it’s like her grammy’s quilt, as you put it ? The chick that’s wearin’ it is what matters. Daww, big-hearted Bavarian lass full of bubbles and cheer warms the cockles of my heart, whether or not the dress is fugly. Whether or not she can sing audibly is not of immediate importance, either xD
You gotta have the ears primed in anticipation, I suppose.
Maybe Damrau should do a duo concert with Magdalena Kozena, another of today’s overhyoed divettes to bring provincial Central European couture to our concert stages.
May I remind a certain poster that I was with her at the concert, and that this post directly contradicts our conversation after the concert?
I concede that the dress was fugly – only half-heartedly though, since I have no real fashion sense ya dig. Wherein lies the contradiction?
two adjectives used during intermission and after the concert were “steely” and “disillusioned”, and not about the dress.
I’ve never seen DD live, but the steeliness of the sound was evident from the moment I first heard a recording of her — in one of those stratospheric Salieri arias from La Scala. She’s certainly an impressive interpreter — the variety of characterisation on her Mozart album is very impressive — but the sound has little charm, which I feel is a prerequisite for a coloratura soprano. (Still, I’ve always had the same problem with Gruberova …)
Poo poo, Sanford. Steely is ballsy in my book…and I was disillusioned only because it didn’t rock my socks off like Gilda did…
don’t make me bitter, ol’ man.
If you had to live with “24″ being cited as an authoritative source on terrorism, foreign policy, police conduct, political art, etc. on every possible occasion by the Great and the Good in America, as some of us Americans are unfortunate enough to have endured this past decade, you just might feel differently about that piece of action-adventure schlop. Next you’ll be defending Norman Podhoretz…
Who cites 24 as anything other than enjoyable action TV? Please include citations.
“Baron Scarpia seems to live or office in a storeroom piled high with wooden crates”
‘office’ is now a verb? Is that the new Queen’s English?
we’ve made “hotel” a verb, so why not “office”?
We did? I’m always the last to know. Next you’ll tell me that Kristy McNicol is a lesbian!
Kristy McNichol is a lesbian.
sure! corporate america gave us the concept of having employees “hotel” their workstations years ago … i work in the new york office of a british concern, and even we do it! and on both sides of the pond, no less …
“i’ll be hoteling while i’m in the london office.”
“i’ll be hoteling whilst i’m in the new york office.”
Wow. I’ve never heard that before. The West Coast must be lagging behind the use of this trend.
oh – not at all! your dotcommers and googlionaires are notorious hotelers when they visit other offices.
That’s what I get for ceding my dotcommer friends in the divorce…
Wow. As a straight Brit, am I ever gonna keep my head well below the parapet on this one! LMAO