Word: tenoritis
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...personal decency is not in question. But nowadays, as he stumbles through answers about what he does not think he remembers and skirts the moral issues involved, he seems to have forfeited, indeed squandered, his role as the nation's moral father. Then too, he has helped set the tenor of the times: the man behind the bully pulpit must also be judged by the content of his sermons...
Move over, Zeffirelli. For a $10 million staging of Verdi's Aida this month, Egyptian-born Impresario Fawzi Mitwali rejected sets for the real thing: the Temple of Luxor on the site of ancient Thebes. Besides Tenor Placido Domingo, opening night featured the 525-member Arena di Verona Opera Company, 180 Egyptian soldiers and 200 extras tramping down the Avenue of the Sphinxes...
More than 4,000 of the glitterati paid up to $600 a ticket. But the echoing acoustics proved atrocious ("double Domingo," cracked one listener). Just 14,000 tickets were sold for the other nine performances (the tenor sang only the premiere), leaving Mitwali in debt. The extravaganza was staged over the initial objections of Muslim fundamentalists and Egyptian antiquities officials, who feared the vibrations and crowds might damage the monuments. Still, Domingo says he hopes to return some day to sing Saint-Saens' Samson et Dalila. Now that will put the ruins to the test...
...answer, as it happens, is none of the above. No one, however, has asked for a refund, for Zeffirelli's vision is as vivid as ever. In addition to Soprano Eva Marton as Princess Turandot, Tenor Placido Domingo as Calaf, her suitor, and the other principals, there are 286 singers and supernumeraries. By comparison, Zeffirelli's Boheme at its most gargantuan fielded a cast of merely 280. Much of the Turandot scenery was shipped from Italy in eleven cargo containers, each 40 ft. long. There are 300 costumes, and the headgear alone uses 44 lbs. of pearls, golf balls, chandelier...
...that really provides the bang for the buck. Zeffirelli and Costume Designer Dada Saligeri offer a regal gold and mother-of-pearl panoply: high atop a throne in the far reaches of the cavernous stage perches the black-clad, thousand-year-old Emperor (Swiss Tenor Hugues Cuenod, making his company debut at 84). For the first time the Met stage, which has swallowed whole such formidable productions as Nathaniel Merrill's 1966 Die Frau ohne Schatten, looks cramped. As is its custom, the Met declines to reveal the spectacle's cost, but best guesses run to about $1.5 million...