Word: sopranos
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...BALD SOPRANO got its title when a rehearsing actor missed his lines before the opening performance and delivered something about a bald soprano. Eugene Ionesco liked the term enough to keep it as the play's name, and it's as good a label...
...rights Offenbach's opera Tales of Hoffmann should belong to the tenor in the title role. It is he, after all, who goes awooing, however unsuccessfully, after Stella the actress, Olympia the windup doll, Giulietta the courtesan and Antonia the consumptive soprano. If he is not careful, though, the tenor can be easily upstaged by the soprano who normally portrays all four heroines. Her music is uniformly exquisite, and on top of that she gets to show her legs in the gondola scene...
...shimmering new Hoffmann that Director Tito Capobianco has conceived and staged for the New York City Opera, it is neither the tenor nor the soprano who steals the show. Instead it is the bass, who plays the four incarnations of the devil. No surprise, since the roles are sung by that master of operatic guises and disguises Norman Treigle. By design, and also by the sheer magic of Treigle's acting, this Hoffmann is a black comedy that belongs-curly locks, shtik and fiddle-to the devil...
...played by Treigle-to win the girls that Hoffmann loses. The first act, for example, usually ends with Coppelius seeming to dismantle the doll Olympia before Hoffmann's horrified eyes. He does so in the new production, but then Coppelius and a happy flesh-and-blood Olympia (Soprano Beverly Sills) are seen embracing behind a curtain. Obviously the girl is part poltergeist, too, and in league with Lucifer...
...blonde comedienne, who did takeoffs of Marilyn Monroe on her late husband Ernie Kovacs' TV show in the '50s and later made "Smoke Me" commercials for Muriel Cigars, was finally making her debut at the Seattle Opera. "I feel opera is my real voice," confessed Soprano Edie after her performance in the title role of Offenbach's La Perichole. "Just think of 72 people on the stage, all singing. Sometimes I feel I must have been born in the wrong century. Now the closet opera singer emerges...