A new low in linkbait
“Little did New York City Opera know when they cast Laquita Mitchell in the lead role of ‘La Traviata’ (‘The Fallen Woman’) the significance it would have on the company’s opening performance on Sunday afternoon at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Less than 24 hours after the death of pop-star Whitney Houston, the color-blind casting of Violetta Valery — a woman done in by a combination of good looks, notoriety and ill-advised love — gave the 159-year old opera a jolt of relevance.”
I couldn’t believe it myself till I googled and, behold…
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2012/02/new-york-city-operas-la-traviata-conjures-whitney-houston.html
So, it seems that one black woman who can sing is like every other black woman who can sing. I can’t believe journalists come out with such determinist tripe in the country which is supposed to be the great melting pot and which is home to tens of millions of people of African-American heritage.
Oh yes Monty, didn’t you know? Its in the Opera-L bylaws that one can not mention Shirley Verrett without also mentioning Grace Bumbry.
Reminds me of the day of the Simpson verdict which coincided with the Met opening night of Otello.
I remember Whitney Houston as La Perichole in San Antonio
Quanto Painy Fakor says:
I remember Whitney Houston as La Perichole in San Antonio
—-
Such is my ignorance that I cannot tell if this is for real or not. Is it a joke?
Can anyone think of a black soprano singing Violetta Valery with NYCO or the Met before?
Camilla Williams, who broke the color barrier for black women in a major US opera company, debuted at NYCO in 1946 as Butterfly, and sang Mimi and Nedda there as well as Aida.
Not long ago we were talking in these pages as to how some roles still seem to be consistently cast with caucasian singers and this was one of them.
Good to know that laquita Mitchel is taking on the role.
I personally would love to see a Traviata set to explore the racial tensions around the Loving case or back 100 years in New Orleans, at a time when white men would keep 2 wives, a black one and a white one.
An interesting sidebar is that to be historically “accurate”, Alfredo should be played by a non-white, as the Dumas’ were of “mixed blood.” What a role it would have been for George Shirley. Quick! While there’s still time — Sean Panikkar !
To Ercole: At The Met, “Traviata” was performed in four acts up until around 1970 or so. I have seen scores, libretti, and other sources indicating that it is an “opera in four acts.” Some of these date back to the 17th Century.
Mr. Shirley sang the part att he Met 14 tiomes, opposite such Violettas as >Moffo, Tucci, Lorengar, CXaballe, Kirsten and Pilou. Those were teh days Violetta-wise.
I thought Pomeroy#s French was beyond awful. Sorry to hear his Italian is similarly bad. Who casts this guy?
Powell shoudl be back at teh Met– better than most of their baritones, certainly better than any of this season#s Valentins.
and btw i just don#t get pannikar save for roles like narraboth which he does well, mazbe steva in jenufa?
no lyrical tone i can hear…
I’d love to see a 17th Century score of Traviata! Is the orchestral part transcribed for a consort of viols??
I don’t have the program from the performance, but if memory serves me correctly I do remember Faye Robinson at NYCO as Violetta.
- When will this endless racial carping cease? It’s getting as bad as the days of affirmative action when it was not just an economic maneuver but also a social-status political attitude. Is it necessary to constantly point out & attempt captitalize on one’s (or someone else’s) mixed race background?
- Some things just never change.
Don’t be so hard on affirmative action, phoenix. It worked for many, many years. I wouldn’t be half the person I am today if fat, German children hadn’t gotten to be first in line for almost everything.
Bobol: Thanks for your historically significant anecdote!
- I am now trying to listen to Sirius rebroadcast Adriana Lecouvreur 1983 with the triple whammy of Scotto, Schicoff & Cortez! I couldn’t figure out why I missed the original broadcast until I listened to it.
Wow, the connection to Whitney Houston is pretty desperate (never mind the quality of the “review”). And frankly, I’m not a fan of term “colour-blind casting”. What does it really mean? Any time you cast a black singer as anything other than a Aida, Amonasro, Selika or a character in Progy & Bess? Or an Asian singer as anything other than Butterfly or Turandot? Haven’t we moved on enough that the term itself should be obsolete?
It simply means that you cast the role with the singer or actor who can best perform it regardless of race or ethnicity. The phrase may have lingered longer than necessary in New York City due to the reviews of the really repulsive John Simon in New York Magazine (not The New Yorker), etc. He once wrote that an actor was too Jewish to play a role, constantly wondered what black people were supposed to be doing in Scotland or playing members of the upper social classes or just about anything on stage except maids and shoe shine “boys” unless the role was specifically a black character.
Selika is an Indian, n’est-ce pas? In spite of the title. Well, Meyerbeer was confused. She couldda been Malagasy as well.
I think Bobby Brown is the reason that the LePage ring is so fucked up…
For a review that does not menton Whitney Houston, the Whitney Museum, Eli Whitney, Houston Street or the Houston Astros, you can always point your browser over to Superconductor: A Girl Dies in Brooklyn.
I considered putting “Whitney Houston” in the keywords for this post but as we says here in Brooklyn, I got too much class.
I had no idea la Traviata has a fourth act….
thanks, S-conductor!..
… a much more “up-beat” right-up, then I’ve read so far..
I AM very curious… and BAM is in my back-yard….
Is it all right to say “John Huston,” “Angelica Huston,” or “Used to know a guy named Fred Abbott”?
*sigh* The far more interesting “racial edge” to the story is the curious fact that Ms. Mitchell starred in the first production after a massive and mostly successful union busting effort by the NYCO board. There’s a long, ugly history of black workers being brought in as “scabs” during major indutrial strikes in the early decades of the 20th century. Black workers, being desperate for employment and excluded from those unions, were all too eager to take the union workers place. Of course the NYCO performers unions no longer engage in those types of anti-black tactics, but there’s still an interesting symmetry there.
As for this piece? Pretty ridiculous and poor Mitchell probably would’ve preferred if someone had actually reviewed her performance (did anyone?). I can only say that reaching for a connection to dear departed Whitney (no I’m not over it and please don’t ask me to move on yet) must be excused for at least another 7 days or so. Many of us are a bit out of our orbits at the moment and are having a difficult time not seeing Whitney Houston everywhere we go and in everything we do.
Entirely unfair. The union agreed to the contract; the cast, chorus and orchestra is all union. Whatever you may think of the process, nobody involved is a scab.
I don’t think Laquita Mitchell is a scab. I’m just saying that there was an interesting irony in her being the first primma donna to sing at NYCO considering its recent history and the longer history of the complex relations between industrial unions and black workers. Chill.
Whitney -the M Callas of the pop world. Sadly so many similar things in both stories- the extraordinary talent, the useless bad boy, the voice gone years before the last excruciating tour, dying early, dying alone.
Regarding ethnicity- always wanted to see a Jewish Butterfly so she could come in singing “Lovely to see you already!”.
Can anyone think of a world-class yiddishe lirico-spinto? What comes to mind first is a Hadassah’s worth of feisty coloraturas (Sills, Peters, Raskin, Tyler).
Rosa Raisa came to mind!
Is this the same Laquita Mitchell? Is she ready for prime time? Violetta?
ON, do you know when that clip is from, by any chance? Based on it, she seems like a very special voice indeed, but nowhere near finished, as you seem to suggest. Still, it does look like a rather studenty set-up, maybe it was a while ago?
well Brooklyn isn’t exactly Covent Garden now is it? Far from Prime Time.
Well, BAM has a very respected, beautiful opera house, although they don’t tend to offer opera much, more dance and performance spectacles, such as Pina Bausch, Mark Morris, Bob Wilson, etc. (and Lepage for a while).
I’ve seen a dozen or more operas at BAM over the years. Multiple performances by Les Arts Florrisants, Nixon in China back in the 1980s, a few Robert Wilson things that either are or aren’t operas, among others.
It’s a nice theater and I think NYCO could do worse than to make BAM their permanent home.
I thought that Caruso’s last performance was at BAM, but according to Wikipedia that isn’t quite right:
“During a performance of L’elisir d’amore by Donizetti at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on December 11, 1920, he suffered a throat haemorrhage and the performance was canceled at the end of Act 1. Following this incident, a clearly unwell Caruso gave only three more performances at the Met, the final one being as Eléazar in Halévy’s La Juive, on December 24, 1920.”
OT; I just received a flyer from LOC stating that one can’t purchase tickets for Netrebko’s Boheme or Reneigh’s Streetcar unless one gets a subscription.
I wrote to them and basically told them to , “shove it”—-as if I were dying to see Reneigh in “Streetcar” or Treb in Boheme!
an advantage of being a subscriber is that you get to buy tickets first. but there will be unsold tickets and in the coming months everyone will be allowed to buy them.
Clita, you are missing nothing. Streetcar is vapid nothingness;
Colin Graham called it “a play with music,” and Fleming is/was
sooooo fey as leading lady. Better to see a revival of The Letter,
if anyone aside from Santa Fe ever does it again; a really good
little bit of grisly show-biz opera. I am a little surprised it has
not had more of an after-life, post Santa Fe premiere.