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]
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…
“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]
“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…
I was trotting along and suddenly it started raining and snowing and you said it was hailing but hailing hits you on the head hard so it was really snowing and raining and I was in such a hurry to meet you but the traffic was acting exactly like the sky and suddenly I see…
Which tenor twink was cruising everything in pants in the men’s room at Carnegie Hall tonight? And do you think he will behave thus when he returns to the Met later this season?
“As Ernesto, Barry Banks struggled against an allergic reaction and a humiliatingly camp pink get-up…” [The Telegraph]
It’s true, it’s true! Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch are going into A Little Night Music! The iconic pair will open in the show on Broadway on July 13. Note: autoplaying video and after the jump!
One of parterre box’s oldest friends and earliest admirers, Der Schmuck der Madonna, emerges from his regal exile momentarily to plug what sounds like a memorable way to spend part of Memorial Day weekend:
“Exciting! Indomitable! Alluring! Rigid! Enormous! Pulsing! Penetrating! Riveting! The public shame of being flogged! Aching tenderness!” [NYT]
La Cieca has decided she is going insert the the following line into her official biography (names and pronouns varied as necessary):
New York City Opera’s latest mailing invites the gays to “Learn to French!”
Multiple-threat Isaac Mizrahi, like everyone else it seems, really wants to direct; and direct he shall for Opera Theater of St. Louis this summer, helming A Little Night Music. And designing the sets and costumes too. [Playbill]
What? Springtime? Adam Lambert? An Ungaro Spring frock (pictured)? Or that old standby, “gayer than eight guys fucking nine guys?” (Not pictured, alas) Yes, all those things are gay, and some are even gay gay gay gay gay. But nothing is or ever was as gay as this:
According to the always reliable Zachary Woolfe, among the beans spilled at the NYCO “Koch” Gala last night was the strong suggestion (from no less than Rufus Wainwright himself) that a production of Prima Donna is planned for an upcoming George Steel-planned season. [New York Observer]
Okay, La Cieca has just revised her standard for “Gayest Thing Ever.”
Oh, La Cieca just hates herself when she get a detail wrong. It seems that languid wunderkind Rufus Wainwright will not be performing his hit aria “Les feux d’artifice” at the gala opening of the New York City Opera saluting noted teabagger David H. Koch. The air will be performed by an actual operatic soprano,…
This is crossover that stops just short of crossdressing.
Ildebrando d’Arcangelo and Andrea Concetti get chummy in this scene from Don Giovanni. [via Barihunks]
Newly beardless Rufus Wainwright once more graced the annual “Last Song of Summer” concert to benefit Robert Wilson‘s Watermill Center last weekend. (Rufus’s boyfriend Jorn Weisbrodt is the Creative Director of the Center.) Despite a “miraculous last minute change of venue to the Field House at The Ross School’s lower school campus on Butter Lane…
According to Variety, Kate Winslet will star in a remake of Mildred Pierce, to be directed by Todd Haynes. Is this, like, the Hurricane Katrina of gay sensibility, or what? Let’s hope HBO goes for a fuller treatment of the story than the classic 1945 Joan Crawford vehicle, including Veda’s budding career as an opera…
The atmosphere around Gotham may become rather more bizarre sometime in the next couple of years when Rufus Wainwright brings his opera Prima Donna into New York.
Oh, but this looks dire. Not the fellow wallowing amidst the counterpane, obviously — he’s rather dishy if you like that type — but rather what he’s advertising. It’s a reworking of Don Giovanni called (La Cieca only wishes she were making this up) “The Gay Don,” to be previewed on July 4 at the…
Tell us: What was the best of 2025?
Parterre Box concludes the thrilling first year of Talk of the Town by inviting your lightning rod opinions on several more categories of operatic argumentation.
