LOOKING THE PART

posted by James Reel

Terry Teachout has posted an old thought piece expressing ambivalence over whether or not opera singers should be attractive. This is an old subject I wrote extensively about in the Star more than 10 years ago, and I won’t repeat my whole argument here, but it boils down to this: Those who claim that what’s most important in opera is the music are simply wrong. Opera by design is dramatic stage work, and all elements of the staging, including direction and casting, are every bit as important as the musical element. Singers who don’t look the part don’t belong there. Let them stick to recitals and oratorios and audio recordings. In straight theater, nobody would accept a 300-pound lump in the role of a waif, and it shouldn’t be acceptable in opera, either. (There are good parts available to 300-pound singers, but Cio-Cio San ain’t one of them.) I simply cannot comprehend how there can be any argument about this.

I WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD

posted by James Reel

A nasty cold kept me off the air and out of the blogosphere for most of last week, and even caused me to hand my weekend reviewing duties over to somebody else. At least I got lots of rest, worked on my 18-month backlog of the New Yorker, got well into Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica and made excellent headway in Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, which I borrowed a couple of years ago from my friend the former head of the UA German studies department, but neglected to finish before I actually went to Vienna; over the weekend I started over, and will now make my way to the end, I swear.

Meanwhile, I appeared in the Tucson Weekly without warning you. Here’s what I contributed to the Aug. 28 issue:

Last week, a half-dozen black-clad Hispanic actors stood on the Beowulf Alley stage, giving a reading of Gavin Kayner's _Noche de los Muertos_. It was a departure for Beowulf Alley in many ways: opening a workshop to the public in preparation for a premiere, later this season, of a local play requiring a Latino cast, something otherwise found almost exclusively at Borderlands Theater. Every element of that sentence represents something new for Beowulf Alley Theatre. It's a house that nearly closed in the summer of 2007 during a financial crisis that shed the company of its artistic director. To cope, the board started some serious brainstorming about fundraising and audience development, and assigned artistic direction to a committee that solicited production proposals from directors in the community. Beowulf Alley is still operating with an undisclosed deficit; the tax form it filed late last year shows that, for the season ending in June 2007, the company spent nearly $38,000 more than it took in, a serious but not necessarily fatal figure for an organization with annual expenses approaching $200,000.

You’ll find the full article here.