La Cieca has obtained this photo of Thomas Hampson headlining Camouflage Night at Powerhouse, uh, rehearsing for Heart of a Soldier at the San Francisco Opera. You can tell the scene is Northern Rhodesia in 1962, because that is where the British military first started offering complimentary personal training packages to their troops. Read more »
La Cieca hears that parterre fave David Daniels will get all eponymous and stuff for a world premiere opera entitled Oscar, based on the life of Oscar Wilde, for Santa Fe Opera in 2013, with Opera Company of Philadelphia to follow. The work is to boast music by Theodore Morrison and a libretto and stage direction by John Cox.
“What I find bizarre is the insistence that no one—not the school, not Opera North, not the local education authority—is being homophobic. Instead, we have the strange position that, because the children are of primary-school age, these lines are too difficult and confusing for them.”
The lines in question are “Of course I’m queer/That’s why I left here/So if you infer/That I prefer/A lad to a lass/ And I’m working class/ I’d have to concur.” [The Guardian]
You only thought the “Brokeback” Eugene Onegin was the gayest possible take on the Tchaikovsky “lyric scenes.” Now, along comes La Cieca’s fave director Stefan Herheim‘s extravagant, transgressive, high-camp symbolist (and about a dozen other adjectives) approach to the work, “gay” in the very best sense of gay sensibility. Video after the jump!
The ever-alert PR people at the English National Opera (why can’t we have a company like this?) have assembled a “what if?” video to promote Nico Muhly‘s impending Two Boys, and thrown in an admirably scruffy “reality” actor to boot.
The annual Duke of York’s Picturehouse Eurovision Party, which is apparently a gay institution in Brighton, is pre-empted this year because of demand for tickets for the Met’s HD of Die Walküre. [BBC News] (Voigt photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera)
“What prevents Company from being the greatest musical ever written (which, given the talents going into it, it certainly could have been) is that there is something central to the work that is false, a cheat.” Our Own JJ (not pictured) reveals his theater queen side in Capital New York.
“Greek night at opera canceled due to conflict” [Indiana Daily Student]
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