La Cieca hears that Bartlett Sher has already signed a new three-opera deal with the Met. The director, who completes his first trifecta with next season’s Le Comte Ory, will reportedly return to the company in 2013-2014 for two productions, one of which will be that new Nico Muhly work, Two and a Half Men…
A Baroque Valentine’s with Opera Lafayette | Feb | DC & NYC
Celebrate love in all its guises with tender ballads, amorous duets, cheeky verses, and bawdy drinking songs plus food, cocktails and wine.
It is not perhaps so surprising that even with the cleverest of the cher public participating, nobody jumped in with the right answer for last week’s Regie quiz. After all, the work depicted was Die Blume von Hawaii, the 1931 operetta composed, as you all know, by Paul Abraham to a libretto by Alfred Grünwald,…
Will was the first cher pube to firmly commit to Don Pasquale, and as such he will be counted the winner of our most recent Regie quiz. Special thanks to eckermann, who earned “Le Mot du Jour” for his meticulously detailed (if totally off-base) analysis.
This one’s not a quiz, because the concept is so elegantly obvious: Das Rheingold as an episode of Baywatch, with the Nibelung’s anvils replaced by a handier set of percussion instruments.
Congratulations LogeLizard for so adeptly pinpointing Manon Lescaut as the solution to our most recent Regie quiz. The production was by Graham Vick for the Teatro la Fenice, and we have a glimpse of this regie in action after the jump.
“Director Manfred Schweigkofler conceives a new production that pits the Capulets and Montagues against one another as dueling fashion houses. Against a backdrop of models, paparazzi and high style, Romeo and Juliet’s love for each other unfolds to its deadly conclusion.” [Opera Company of Philadelphia]
Right you are if you think you are, cher public! Our most recent Regie quiz did indeed depict a new production of Wagner’s Rienzi, directed by Philipp Stölzl. (Photo credit: Bettina Stoess im Auftrag der Deutschen Oper Berlin) No handy dome-shaped landmarks in this next quiz, cher public, so La Cieca will leave you to…
Our Own Ercole Farnese exercised his sharp eye for detail almost before La Cieca got the most recent Regie quiz posted: within 25 minutes he identified the work in question as Norma. We have video of the controversial Peter Mussbach staging after the jump.
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.
La Cieca admits the Regie quiz candidate from a couple of weeks ago was something of a ringer as it was a new work, and a children’s opera at that. So it’s only reasonable that none of you guessed it was Antonia und der Reißteufel, as performed at the Vienna Volksoper. (Duh!)
“Unlike Ms. Garanca, Ponselle was among the many Carmens who have tried some real dancing.” Why is La Cieca not surprised that one of the few intelligent and detailed surveys of the dramatic element of the Met’s new Carmen should be written by a dance critic? [NYT]
Speaking of people what have “ridden that streetcar,” Antipodean diva Cheryl Barker‘s sudden withdrawal from Opera Australia’s first new production of Tosca in almost three decades seems to be based on her objection to the staging by Christopher Alden.
Last week’s Regie quiz can be summed up in three little words: “far too easy!” Practically everybody got it right on the first guess: Die Frau Ohne Schatten, as seen at the Opernhaus Zürich in a production by the hopelessly conventional David Pountney. A somewhat less conventional production of a far less conventional opera follows…
La Cieca would be fascinated to find out how you did it, Hoffmann. However did you guess that last week’s Regie quiz in fact portrayed Rusalka — as envisioned by that new parterre darling Stefan Herheim for Oper Graz!
“A Zeffirelli, dopo le polemiche della vigilia che lo hanno opposto al soprano Daniela Dessì, da lui ritenuta non giusta per il ruolo di Violetta in questa Traviata, qualche dissenso misto agli applausi al momento di comparire in proscenio assieme a Gelmetti.” [Il Messaggero]
Several of you guessed correctly that our most recent Regie quiz was La fanciulla del West, in the “leather bar” production by Nikolaus Lehnhoff for De Nederlandse Opera. After the jump, a look at more of this production in action.
As anotherjj was quick to deduce, the lady in the kitchenette was indeed Cio-Cio-San. La Cieca will note in passing that she searched through perhaps three dozen productions of Madama Butterfly until she could find one that didn’t immediately give the game away. No matter where one goes, the Japanese Tragedy is going to feature…
“Rache serviert genießt man am besten kalt!”
1. DON’T STAGE THE OVERTURE. Surprise: Verdi and Rossini and Wagner Mozart actually worked in the theater most of their lives, so give them credit for knowing that the overture is there to get the audience in the mood, to ease their transition from “outside” to “inside.”
Okay, La Cieca is finally ready to add another hard and fast “don’t” to her Rules for Stage Directors. To wit: Even if a scene calls for something fantastical, and even if the mezzo doesn’t actually walk out of the production when she first sees the costume… if your imagery immediately and inevitably screams “Star…
The dreaded Regie rears its ugly head in an unexpected venue: a children’s Christmas pageant! “Humbug teachers at a primary school have come under fire for re-writing this year’s Christmas pantomime of Hansel and Gretel – to make them hooded yobs. “The fairytale characters have been re-cast as violent thugs who terrorise their neighbourhood and…
Smartly done, Jim, for last week’s quiz was indeed “Lear, with the little dogs taken literally.” This was the Reimann opera, as performed at the Komische Oper in a production by Hans Neuenfels. Moving on, then. What’s this blonde’s problem?
Christof Loy’s dreamlike, pared-down production of Donizetti’s 1833 masterpiece Lucrezia Borgia, created for the Bayerischen Staatsoper, is brought to life on Medici DVD from performances in July 2009. The DVD of the performance is accompanied by another hour-long DVD, The Art of Bel Canto: Edita Gruberova, which includes some fascinating rehearsal and performance footage of…
Hunkentenor Giuseppe Filianoti performs a little “risqué business” in this trailer for a new production of L’elisir d’amore that opened last night at the Bayerische Staatsoper.
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.
