parterre box

Dear departed Shelley Winters knew a thing or two about the diva experience, and one of her most apt mediations on the topic may be found in her memoirThe Middle of My Century.

She was starring in the Broadway production of A Hatful of Rain, and during rehearsals she stumbled on the heavily raked stage, fracturing an ankle. As such, she had to open the show on crutches. After one performance, Ms. Winters continues:

I was resting in my dressing room when Joan Crawford came backstage. “Well, Shelley,” she haughtily informed me, “you were very powerful and had the entire audience weeping, but if I had a role with a drug-addict husband, was seven months pregnant, and had a broken leg, I could make the entire audience faint.”

La Cieca is not sure exactly how this all relates, but she vaguely intuits it has something to do with two opera-related pieces in today’s New York Times.

To put it briefly and bluntly, yeah, sure, in La traviata Renée Fleming may have “conveyed emotional ambiguity, the coquettish facade of a kept woman determined to convey pride and sexual allure, while her shame lurks just below the surface.”  But she didn’t do it in a wheelchair, did she?

“Ya are going on tonight at the Royal Opera in Barbiere. In a wheelchair!”

La Cieca hears that Joyce DiDonato took the proverbial “break a leg” too literally during the opening night of new production of Il barbiere di Siviglia at Covent Garden yesterday. The mezzo caught her foot in a track on the steeply-raked stage and fractured her leg during the first act. Despite the pain, she continued the performance with a cane, and won a long ovation in the second act when Rosina complained “E’ un granchio al piede!” (It wasn’t until after the performance that the singer was taken to the emergency room; she soldiered on with what she thought was a sprain.)