festoonery
Pop culture diva Kim Kardashian seized the opportunity of Sunday night’s Met gala to perform a scene from a lesser-known Richard Strauss opera, Der Schatten ohne Frau.
By La Cieca
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A loyal reader calls this little number “the worst gown I’ve ever seen.” La Cieca she agrees that Mme. Guleghina’s fashion faux pas here just screams, “that was no lady, that was Lady Macbeth.” On the other hand, your doyenne has seen some rather ghastly frocks in her time, and she’s sure, cher public, that…
By La Cieca
Dame Kiri te Kanawa embraces her inner Alexis Morell Carrington Colby Dexter Rowan for this scene from the Handelian pastiche The Sorceress. Despite the film’s 1993 release date, the sensibility is pure ’80s: massive hair, voluminous frock, garish lighting design… and don’t overlook the multitude of smirking supers! (Just so you know, the aria is…
By La Cieca
“My theory: Composers who ignore significant parts of their being – nationality included – cut their creativity off at the knees. Barber was being derivative in self-defeating ways out of deference to the operatic genre. Bernstein, in comparison, was out to tell important stories using the most effective means possible…” David Patrick Stearns adds his…
By La Cieca
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This is why drag was invented. The artistes are James Bondage and Bella ToDyeFor.
By La Cieca
“Opera’s ‘fat lady’ is a Madison cash cow“ In other news: has anyone ever heard Natalie Bancroft sing opera? Ms. Bancroft is the scioness of the family who recently sold their controlling share in Dow Jones (and thus the Wall Street Journal) to Newscorp for a thousand million gazillion pounds or whatever it was. Anyway,…
By La Cieca
According to the Guardian Unlimited, the “cash-strapped” government of Greece is scrambling to raise sufficient funds to purchase over $1 million worth of Maria Callas memorabilia at a Sotheby’s auction on December 12. The “voluminous” collection to be auctioned includes “a fabulous array of intimate letters, jewels, evening dresses, furniture, paintings, photographs, unseen stage notes…
By La Cieca
“Over-accessorizing and poor taste in makeup is not an excommunicable offense,” a specialist on Catholic canon law has explained. The expert was speaking to the San Francisco Chronicle in the wake of a scandal involving San Francisco’s Archbishop George Niederauer and the activist group the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. On October 7, Niedarauer delivered the…
By La Cieca
One of La Cieca’s pet peeves (and you know she has so many she has to keep them organized with a spreadsheet), well, anyway, one of La Cieca’s pet peeves is that operatic orgies so rarely bear even the vaguest resemblance to orgies in real life. Why, just last week, La Cieca was viewing the…
By La Cieca
New York-based artist Nikos Floros has created an artistic tribute to La Divina herself from 20 thousand beer and soft drink cans for an art exhibition in Athens. The exhibition includes a sculptural gown inspired by Maria Callas’s costume for Iphigénie en Tauride featuring ring-pulls that become a lace-like collar. A kimono sculpture is inspired…
By La Cieca
La Cieca’s spy backstage at the Met burbles about the most interesting spectacle so far at the new Macbeth: “Maria Guleghina’s rehearsal garb! One day she sported a green spaghetti-strap midriff top (that’s right, she wore a belly shirt), with a sequined crown across her tits.”
By La Cieca
Struggling downtown artiste Robert Wilson has been rendered homeless since his recent “eviction” from the 6,000 square foot loft he leased since the early 1970s. The space is located in a building on Vestry Street in trendy TriBeCa that’s scheduled for demolition to make way for, what else, luxury condominiums. The bereft avante-gardiste has been…
By La Cieca
“Jossie is a wild girl,” says a former MetOpera colleague. “You never knew what gutter you’d wake up in when you went out with her.” …. As her career began to escalate, so did, by many accounts, her outlandish party lifestyle and behavior. Like Carmen, Pérez moved fluidly from man to man, boasting to colleagues…
By La Cieca