“The deep stirrings that open Brokeback Mountain, the opera, rise up from the bowels of the orchestra…. And those tones are gripping.”
By La Cieca
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“…a perfect marriage of text and music, creating a series of tableau-like scenes, as if Paul’s story is being related through a series of exquisitely posed still photographs…”
By La Cieca
“Will the actors stepping into the iconic roles live up to the perfection of Heath Ledger and Tob[e]y Maguire?”
By La Cieca
“The La clemenza di Tito contract will be offered as a ‘Solo Dancer’ contract and requires 8 physically fit men…. The David McVicar production…”
By La Cieca
The scene outside the Met last night (above) and inside (after the jump).
By La Cieca
And then she was all like, “Nuh-uh! Igor was so not gay,” and I was all like…
By La Cieca
You have only until Sunday to catch the most heart-breaking moments seen on New York City operatic stages this season.
At last, the quintessential targeted reader of parterre.com has been identified.
By La Cieca
After 23 years, the Queen of Carthage has finally made it to Manhattan.
I have a confession to make about Britten’s opera Billy Budd: I don’t like it very much.”
By La Cieca
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.
By La Cieca
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…
By La Cieca
“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…
By La Cieca
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!
By La Cieca
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.
By La Cieca
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)
By La Cieca
“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.
By La Cieca
“Greek night at opera canceled due to conflict” [Indiana Daily Student]
By La Cieca
Separated at birth: “Tu che di gel” goddess Renata Scotto and “Too much hair gel” oddness Johnny Weir. This is also holiday-themed breaking news because Johnny has now officially donned his gay apparel. [After Elton]
By La Cieca
New York Festival of Song’s Manning the Canon: Songs of Gay Life is a delightfully lighthearted, deeply personal, and colorful recital made of equal parts sex, camp, melancholy, and tenderness. Steven Blier‘s wide-ranging program consists of five sets of songs, each meant to evoke, as per his program notes, “a quintessential moment of a gay…
By scifisci
“Great at push-ups and pull-ups? Do you put your friends to shame at the gym? Come show us what you’ve got! San Francisco Opera announces a public casting call seeking athletic men with specific skills to appear in an upcoming Company production in Fall 2011.” [San Francisco Opera]
By La Cieca
“Tyler Perry‘s… For Colored Girls does feel like a ghoulish joke, a dated horror show bordering on parody. It’s both operatic and tone deaf, with explosions of hysteria that include a drunken Macy Gray performing a back-alley abortion and the conversion of a poem spoken by [Ntozake] Shange‘s Lady in Purple into an actual opera…
By La Cieca
