According to an article in The New York Times, the Manhattan Theater Club has decided to go forward after all with their production of a Corpus Christi by Terence McNally (Master Class, The Lisbon Traviata, Love, Valour, Compassion) because a gang of "Christian" terrorists have threatened to bomb the theater. The controversy follows rumors that some dialogue in the play suggests that the "Jesus-like" leading character had homosexual relations with his "apostles."

William Donohue, president of Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, said, "While McNally has every legal right to insult Christians, he has no moral right to do so." He warned that "if some other production company decides to pick it up, it had better not be thin-skinned: we'll wage a war that no one will forget." In the meantime, the theater received threatening telephone calls from a group who threatened to bomb the theater and to "exterminate the Jew McNally" Donohue claims his group had nothing to do with those calls. 

La Cieca thinks the Catholic Church must have fallen on very hard days indeed. To think that after almost 2000 years, this august institution should be threatened by a few lines of dialogue in a Broadway play! I suppose that's what we get for not expecting the Spanish Inquisition! 

Cigar Lover Joseph Volpe hinted last month that he would retire as the Met's general manager sometime around 2005, but that didn't stop him from playing nonstop spin doctor the final week of the season. At a meeting of the Met Patrons, and a few days later in his traditional "end of season" intermission feature, Volpe continued to indulge his latest hobby of demonizing the Alagnas - and, of course, those pesky audience members who were so mean to poor Robert Wilson. Among the more interesting tibits Volpe dropped were the fact the original production team for Traviata (no names please!) submitted "two and a half" scenic concepts without tickling Joe's fancy; he then turned to Zeffirelli in desperation, as it were. Speaking of desperation, Volpe answered criticism of the Robert Wilson Lohengrin by laying the blame squarely on the shoulders of "an orchestrated booing campaign against this production which began after the lighting rehearsals last summer." (The List Hall audience laughed openly, and at the Patron's meeting an elderly lady in the audience yelled, "I wasn't orchestrated!") In both cases, Volpe shouted down the hecklers, insisting that the Lohengrin was a huge success - despite the fact that the critics, the audience and the performers all hated it. One felt the iron hand in the velvet glove when Volpe alluded to how the Met's security forces ejected "disruptive" audience members who heckled Carlo Bini all those years ago; one need not be a mindreader to understand that as a threat to anyone who dares to boo another stage director. 

Then there was the matter of "singers who have reputations manufactured for them by record companies before they even sing at the Met." Volpe revealed to his Patron audience that he had recently received a fax from Hughes Gall of the Paris Opera "congratulating" him for firing the Alagnas, then turned his postdated ire on against yet another on the Enemies List, Cheryl Studer. The Met, it seems, sued Studer for cancelling and won a cash judgement! Time constraints, alas, prevented Mr. Volpe from demonizing some other singers who have crossed him, including Mary Costa, Lawrence Tibbett, Jean de Reszke, and Anna Strada del Po. 

But, back to the Alagnas. Putting aside the issues of the conductor (the couple wanted Simone Young) and bad faith about a planned telecast, does it come to a surprise to anyone that the Alagnas preferred not to work with Zeffirelli? The Zef and Mme. Gheorghiu have already locked horns once over the trivial subject of a wig; so how can one realistically expect that they would collaborate successfully on one of the most difficult and emotionally subtle roles in the repertoire? Were there no other producers available?

The Alagnas were not, La Cieca thinks, bargaining from a position of strength: their Roméo et Juliette was pretty routine stuff, nothing to inspire fans to hunger strikes or anything. Alagna was in decent voice, and the role suits his rather dry tone. He moves well and swordfights very well, and he even looks good standing still. He can project meaningful text in French, though I wish to God he would get rid of that horrible unstylistic back-of-the-throat Yves Montand "r". The poetry of the phrasing is inversely proportional to the difficulty of the line:the cries of "Viens, parais" in the aria were jerky and coarse. 

Juliette is not Gheorghiu's role. Only the very top of her voice worked reliably, and it's an exciting, visceral sound up there. Her whole middle register is scrambled and brutally out of tune. Much of the opera she sang in that "debole" unsupported sound certain lyric sopranos use in the last act of Boheme or Traviata, and she tired before the Potion Aria. (La Cieca honestly wonders whether this soprano is capable of singing Violetta any more.) She is of course stunningly beautiful and she has star stage presence, but she seemed ill-at-ease. 

Curiously, given this pair's highly-publicized offstage liaison, there is very little onstage electricity between the two of them:they are rather clumsy in their clinches, like amateurs in a high school production of West Side Story. The star of the night was Bertrand de Billy, coaxing the most heavenly French timbre and phrasing from the underrehearsed and overworked Met orchestra.The string tone at the top of Acte V had this melting vox humana quality that was just heartbreaking. And the rest: Russell Braun threw off a most nimble "Mab" with his second-rate voice, and Kristine Jepson chirped Stephano charmingly. Robert Lloyd was solid, nothing more. 

At the finish of Handel's Saul at BAM conductor Nicholas McGegan gestured for the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra's solo obbligato players to bow:flutes, oboes, trumpets, even carillons. And then the singers took a group call.That curious redistribution of adulation was, as it turned out, quite in order: the orchestra played superbly, but the vocalists (with two significant exceptions) were mediocre at best. McGegan's band must be the last word in performance of baroque music: crisp, lively, rich in timbre without heaviness or opacity.

Perfectly cast as the boy-king, David Daniels was in fine form , which means that he sounded (as he is) like one of the four or five greatest classical singers in the world today. As always, his strongest effect is made in the simplest pieces, with the sort of sweet, unforced and subtle lyric singing that you just don't hear anywhere else these days. Daniels particularly impressed in the radiant "Mourn, Israel" finale, his voice soaring over the chorus without ever turning harsh or losing connection with the legato line. (Here's an interview with the "godlike David.)

Daniels found a worthy partner in Dominique Labelle, a lyric-coloratura soprano with a ravishing soft-grained mezzavoce.Her role of Michal is the good girl of the piece, and I don't doubt that the part could come off pretty cloying. But Ms. Labelle never whined, never pouted, and, most of all, never made a sound that was anything less than lovely. Of course she commanded fluent divisions and a very musical trill, but she also could float a seamless line both high and low.She brought a charming sense of humanity to this one-dimensional character; I look forward to hearing her in showier roles. 

The rest of the cast inhabited a far lower level of talent and taste: the nadir was Neal Rogers' Witch of Endor, sung in an imitation Margaret Hamilton cackle: ghastly in exactly the wrong way.David Thomas's snarling reducing Saul's wrath to crankiness; Jennifer Smith yowled her way through the bravura role of Merab in a tone that might (just) be acceptable as one of the Orphans in Rosenkavalier. 

Congratulations to Mr. McGegan for his brilliance in preparing the orchestra:I cannot imagine this music played better.Could he not perhaps cut back on the frenzied jazzercize routine he did on the podium? I got tired just watching him. (More reviews.) 

Now, mon cher public, if La Cieca can get serious for just a moment. (Spotlight on just my head and shoulders, please.) La Cieca has discovered to her chagrin that costs at parterre box are going up, but she is determined to keep the subscription price steady and, in fact, to continue to distribute the zine free to a selected group of gay organizations such as the Vito Russo Library here in New York. We can do all that, and we can improve our coverage of the world of queer opera, too - if you subscribe. parterre box is still only $18/year ($28 outside the US). Please make checks payable to James Jorden. The address is parterre box, 174 W. 76th #12-G, NY, 10023. La Cieca thanks you for your time. And now, back to our Million Dollar Movie, Robert Wilson's 3-D House of Wax.... 

A prominent local opera queen (who, La Cieca believes, once wrote a successful play) has written an overwrought piece for a local daily newspaper in which he lumped La Cieca together with the "stuffed-swan" (i.e., ultra-conservative) Met audiences, this gentleman opined, we are told, invariably "boo the new." Given that the author of that article regularly dishes every soprano younger than dear Claudia Muzio, one has to wonder at his definition of "new," but, anyway, what he says about "the Met audience" is still so much bought-and-paid-for hooey. Last season, the Met presented Tim Albery's Midsummer Night's Dream, done in a boldly post-modern style, and the opening night audiences cheered him; the well-received Rake's Progress and Samson et Dalila this season were hardly standard productions either. But the "conservative" audience lustily booed Franco Zeffirelli's Carmen, a most traditional interpretation.

And, of course, the "audience," whether for a single night or for a whole season, is not a monolith; different people have different opinions. Each of those people comes into the theater with a different set of expectations and needs. An artist is in a sense a professional communicator. If that communication fails, the artist should, I think, bear the larger part of the responsibility. Blaming the audience is too easy. 

Though La Cieca can certainly understand why Robert Wilson was so ready to blame the audience: the opening night of Lohengrin was perhaps the biggest scandale she has ever seen in the theater. She is not ashamed to say that she herself raised her voice in protest: in fact, the experience left her sounding like one of the Dueling Bankheads after a particularly rough night out.

Now, La Cieca was of two minds after the first act, as any of le tout New-York can tell you (my dears, everyone was there!) During the interval, we avidly analyzed the repertory of Wilson effects (the pinspotted faces, the drag makeup, the odd posturing, the silly walks).We did the mental exercise of attempting to find some logical "Gesamtkunstwerk"-like connection between the aural and visual elements of the opera: was, for example, Elsa's slow circling around Lohengrin meant to symbolize her hesitation to accept his fateful offer of assistance? We tried to decipher exactly what the hell it was Deborah Polaski was doing up there:

• Diamanda Galas as Mrs. Danvers? 
• Diana Vreeland as Medea? 
• Lilith Crane as the Bride of Frankenstein? 
• "Lypsinka IS Die Frau ohne Schatten?" 

Perhaps my strongest aesthetic objection to Mr. Wilson's work in the opera house is his apparent insistence on reducing the performers to automatons, a task for which very few singers (and even fewer great singers) are suited. To expect opera singers to master Wilson's style of movement in a few weeks is as unrealistic as believing an untrained singer could master the vocal intricacies of a bel canto opera in the same brief span. 

A great interpreter creates his own performing style within the broad parameters of some operatic tradition or another. Magda Olivero's unique acting was in fact her own refinement of the bravura performance of the early part of this century, and Leonie Rysanek's thrillingly emotional style was a synthesis of expressionism and Wieland Wagner, compounded with her own unique sensibility. It is true that Deborah Polaski vogued her way through Mr. Wilson's prescribed contortions with great commitment but the rest of the performers, with less lurid stage business, were dull and generic. 

You know, this production is exactly the sort of thing (in theory) that La Cieca should like. Wilson's work is very much within the "queer art" aesthetic, most especially in its intense fascination with surface as divorced from affect. In this, Wilson is solidly in the tradition of such diverse queer artists as Oscar Wilde, Marlene Dietrich, Robert Mapplethorpe and John Waters. However, I was left with the feeling that Wilson did not deliver anything like the towering work of art he promised: the show was clever in parts, sometimes impressive, occasionally surprising. But, great art -- no, I don't see it.

Perhaps the position of opera producer represents for Mr. Wilson his "Peter Principle" Level of Incompetence, and is therefore where he unfortunately will continue to be employed. A pity, because the shows Wilson created from scratch (his famous spectacles of the 1970s in collaboration with Philip Glass, for example) were expressions of an interesting and different sensibility, with an enthusiastic public. I cannot imagine why this undeniably talented gentleman should insist on taking on a project for which he is so clearly ill-suited. 

La Cieca thinks she has found a sort of tie-in between the stories of Wilson and the Alagnas: both are concerned with the balance of power between singer and stage director. It is apparent that most singers really have only two options when working with an important producer: to go along with his ideas, or to ask to be released from the production. Of course, the story is not over when the singer makes his decision to stay or to go. The aftermath of this conflict is that his attitude toward the director, the company and indeed to his art are all altered, subtly but noticeably. Every time a singer gives in and just "sucks up" abuse and humiliation, he gets a little more cynical and therefore puts a little more distance between himself and the thing that connects him to his art.Call it the "sacro fuoco" or whatever, but every act of saying, "The hell with it, this is just a gig. I'll do whatever this asshole tells me to do, and move on" dims that flame just a little bit. What Bob Wilson, Franco Zefirelli and some other operatic control queens do not seem to accept is that a singer is an artist too, and that singer may well have a "vision" of the work that is just as meaningful and valid as the producer's and the conductor's. Just as even the greatest conductors are supposed to collaborate with singers in matters of phrasing and style, a producer should be able to accomodate the individuality and uniqueness of his performers.

Katia Ricciarellisaid recently, "opera singers ain't dumb," and, you know, she's right. Singers are creative artists.Some, like, for example, the late Leonie Rysanek, can legitimately be called "genius." You may recall that Mme. Rysanek herself devised the concept for the re-appearance of the Old Countess in the recent Met Queen of Spades, certainly the most thrilling image in that production; in fact, a theatrical moment that will live in my memory as one of the greatest artistic experiences of my life. That same Leonie Rysanek withdrew from a production of Cavalleria Rusticana in San Francisco because the producer stubbornly insisted on her playing Santuzza as obviously pregnant. This idea was directly in conflict to Rysanek's well-considered characterization. Should Rysanek have meekly submitted and "just sucked it up"? Well, she was Rysanek, and she had the clout and the willpower to say no.

Most of today's singers, however, would give in, grudgingly, and deliver a performance reeking of passive-aggressive mediocrity - or else quit in a huff. How many defeats of this sort would it take to reduce even a Rysanek to the level of soullessness and cynicism of so many of today's singers -- just do it, take the money, and get on the plane. Now, understand, that La Cieca is now and has always been strongly pro-regisseur. She is fanatically committed to opera as a strongly theatrical experience, and she honestly believes a great producer is as valid and important to opera as singer, conductor, or even composer. But she cannot accept the idea that the producer's "vision" is the only one that may be expressed in the theater. Singers are not trained animals or circus clowns or painted puppets. They are artists, and they should be treated with respect. 

That most fabulous of all opera companies, La Gran Scena, makes its long-overdue official Lincoln Center debut on June 4 in a gala program of scenes at Alice Tully Hall. This promises to be one of the summer's most glittering queer events, so La Cieca excects to see you there! More information!

Read parterre box the way it's MEANT to be read: in magazine form. Issue #31 (which subscribers had in their hands April 21) includes a revealing interview with David Daniels, a moving opera-queen tribute to Leonie Rysanek, and opera rant from unindicted co-conspirator Enzo Bordello. Get one whole year (six BULGING issues) delivered directly to your own lovely home by sending a check or money order for $20 ($35 for 2 years) made to James Jorden to