Word: divas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ball gowns, they make their entrance with Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries, wielding spears and boas with imperious belligerence as they battle for the spotlight. The performance is presided over by a folksy/bitchy hostess, "Miss Sylvia Bills," a Kewpie-doll look-alike of "America's Most Beloved Retired Diva." She seats herself in an armchair, vodka bottle at the ready, and introduces the samplings from operatic war-horses. (Typical plot synopsis: "Manon falls in love in 16 bars. Sounds like me after the show...
...youngest of the three women in Reardon's book. Waters is featured last, her story playing dessert as Fisher's did hors d'ocuvre. But the entree, naturally, is Reardon's portrait of Julia Child, the six foot tall throaty-voiced diva who brought bouillabaise to thousands of living rooms. Julia--who in college wanted to be either a novelist or a professional basketball player and liked to perform tom-tom dances, who sought during WWII to be trained as a spy and was eventually posted to Ceylon, who finally turned to cooking--Julia dominates the book...
...Bedtime Stories, though, she successfully pulls herself out of the time warp by surrounding herself with au courant '90s performers such as Babyface (who co-wrote two tracks on Bedtime Stories and also sings on them), critical darling Me'Shell NdegeOcello (who plays bass and raps) and Icelandic alternative diva Bjork (who co-wrote a tune). One of the songs on the new CD, Inside of Me, even shamelessly samples from Back and Forth, a pop hit by the hot teenage singer Aaliyah that is still on the Billboard charts (Madonna does list Aaliyah in the credits). Aaliyah and Babyface...
From the moment of the Met triumph, Upshaw made it clear she intended to be a singer first, a diva second. She had performed in only a few operas and had barely established a recital career when she produced two astonishing albums. On one, released in 1989, she sang Samuel Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and compositions by Menotti, Stravinsky and John Harbison. The other, which came out two years later, is called The Girl with Orange Lips and is a collection of highly unusual contemporary pieces. Both won Grammys. Her next album, the Symphony No. 3 by Polish...
...Gilbert's candybox-pretty score into swing, jazz and gospel arrangements that bounce like the 1940s. Lyrically, they will ask themselves which is worse, rewriting some of Arthur Sullivan's urbane verse (one big laugh comes when Katisha, a scorned lady of the court played as a black street diva by Loretta Devine, screeches, "You piss me off!") or rendering much of what is left all but unintelligible through vocal pyrotechnics and general high spirits from a decidedly multicultural cast...