Post-season rag

New York City Opera Education and the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture presented an evening of discussion, poetry and music from Scott Joplin’s opera, Treemonisha last night to an overflow crowd. 

All things Brit and beautiful

“Time and tide wait for no one” pontificates Myrtle the barmaid, setting the tone for André Previn’s opera about fleeting romance but enduring love:  Brief Encounter.  Loosely based on the play Still Life by Noël Coward and the screenplay for the film Brief Encounter by Coward and David Lean, this opera (now on CD) tells…

“Little,” Joyce

I’ve had this DVD sitting in my apartment for literally months – mea culpa, La – and I finally got around to watching Mark Adamo’s opera Little Women last weekend. Commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera, the piece received almost unanimous critical and popular acclaim when it premiered in 1998. This DVD was recorded for…

Happy endings

Let me take you back, Parterreians, to the spring of 2009. Shortly before the Met’s new La sonnambula opened, murmurings began to be heard, rumors began to circulate. After the open dress rehearsal, reports were filed as opera fans looked on in horror. At the première, a shell-shocked audience rained down boos on the production…

Brits blow it again

A drag queen friend of La Cieca’s — long before she was La Cieca — used to have an expression she to describe the terminally inept. The queen would say, “That guy could screw up a blowjob.” By which she meant, of course, receiving a blowjob, i.e., just sitting there, or standing there or whatever.

“The truth is on the march and I will stop it” “The truth is on the march and I will stop it”

Do any of you out there ever wonder exactly what it is an “Artistic Administrator” does?