Last night, Jeopardy‘s Alex Trebek invaded the Met’s costume shop.
Smartly done, cher diseur de bons mots: Monsieur Hoffmann rightly guessed last week’s puzzler to be Don Giovanni. The production by Doris Dörrie is currently playing the Staatsoper Hamburg.
Elsewhere, the Regie never stops, as you will see after the jump. Read more »
Three Juliettes, three different seasons of the Met’s Roméo et Juliette: Natalie Dessay in 2005, Anna Netrebko in 2007, Hei-Kyung Hong in 2011. At this rate, La Cieca predicts that the role will be performed in the nude sometime around 2025. (Photos: Dessay and Hong by Marty Sohl, Netrebko by Ken Howard.)
As if wowing a capacity crowd at his Met debut recital were not enough, protean performer Andrea Bocelli has branched out into an entirely new field as a wardrobe stylist. He’s pictured here with satisfied clients Angela Gheorghiu and Renée Fleming.
What a concept, or La Cieca should say what a concept! This is Regie at its finest and most boldly satirical, genius that makes Graham Vick look like two-day-old steak frites. For this production of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, the director (unnamed, alas in the YouTube clip below) utilizes the cinematic convention of the flash-forward in a postmodern epoch-bending variation. What if, this staging asks, Manon were to survive her various torments and travails? What would her life be like at, say, age 60? And what if, instead of hanging around mosquito-ridden Louisiana, she invested in a condo in Miami Beach [...]
“If [Francesca] Zambello were a composer, she would surely be Meyerbeer.” [MusicWeb International]
First things first: how are the clothes? Well, there’s enough leather to fill The Eagle ten times over, and there’s definitely fodder for intermission conversation: an adorable tweedy, puffy coat for Uldino; the pimped-out spiky bike helmet with the L.E.D. lights for Attila; all the L.E.D. lights in fact, like the ones that outline Ezio’s epaulettes; that insane blonde beehive wig with the single massive braid—worn, mais oui, with sparkly headband—that makes Violeta Urmana’s Odabella look half-Marge Simpson, half-Aubrey Beardsley Salome. But, good, bad, or crazy, the clothes are just that: clothes.
Tomorrow night’s performance of Attila promises to be a visual feast, especially for those of us whose visual aesthetic was crystallized in the 1960s era of gigantic hair, pearlized eyeshadow, liquid eyeliner and sharply tailored sportswear. And Violeta Urmana‘s look is pretty fierce too!
Cher Public