When you're surfing around the net, you come across some oddities. Opera News has a collection of anecdotes of when it went wrong. Some are just accidents or human error. Then there are what can only be described as gross errors of judgement and, frankly, poor taste:
...In a later production, at Maggio Musicale in Florence, Jonathan Miller was setting the same scene and told me to run out of Donna Anna's house. �You�ll only be wearing your shirt.� I wasn�t sure I heard right. �Only a shirt?� He explained �You�ll be naked from the waist down, carrying your pants. Run across the stage, dart into a shadow and put them on during that exchange with Donna Anna.� The critics jumped on it, and one British newspaper reported, �Mr. Ramey as Don Giovanni made his entrance with a waving willy.� Zubin Mehta was conducting, and at every performance, when I stopped downstage to sing my first line, he would bury his head in the score!
Maybe I'm a bit girly, but I can only ask: "Why?"
Mind you, I like this snippet from 'Opera Now'
Booing the director is all very fashionable in opera houses these days, but in Rio de Janeiro, the victim struck back. Greeted by a chorus of derision after his Tristan und Isolde (which contained scenes of masturbation and drug taking - ho hum...), director Gerald Thomas turned round and bared his bottom to the audience. The look of horror on the faces of the cast had to be seen to be believed, according to one commentator who was at the performance (they, after all, got the full-frontal view):For all his pains, the director now faces criminal charges of public indecency which could land him in jail for a year. Still, it would all be good research for a future production of Fidelio
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