In a message dated 01/14/2002 3:05:06 PM Central Standard Time, lolipastor@a... writes:
<< I was referring to your misadventures in the midwest -- the fabulous opera you were telling us about...I had my roommate in stitches over that one!!!>>
Ah, well, that was a CHICAGO gig, not a Wisconsin gig, so any "cheesy" remarks from certain people can go south of the state border! :)
<< Sounds kind of like this musical, Zoro, that some local Houstonites wrote a few years ago-- borrowing music from Bizet, Rossini, etc... the love theme of the whole show was to Debussy's Clair de Lune. The words were:
"Oh moon, full of care, full of love and despair..."
it was pretty bad. But then I got to thinking... wasn't Kismet basically the same premise? Some guys decided that they liked Borodin's music so they set their own words to it and made a musical. Personally, I really like Kismet -- but I bet some Borodin purists had a field day with it... >>
Well, I heard thru the grapevine that Chicago Symphony did something similar for their Christmas program with music from CARMEN and the like... plus people call the movie CARMEN JONES a classic, and the words in that seem really weird to me, particularly the Habanera as "Dat's Love." Plus I HATE the practice of writing words out in dialect, whatever the dialect. It's one thing to instruct someone to speak/sing a text in dialect, but to spell it out - literally - seems demeaning. "Ain-a dat good news" comes to mind, as does, "Can't help lovin' dat man o'mine." I don't think it should be sung with precise Anglo diction, but it just seems too simplistic to spell it out.... JMO
Christine Thomas Wauwatosa, WI <A HREF="http://hometown.aol.com/mezzoid/myhomepage/profile.html"> http://hometown.aol.com/mezzoid/myhomepage/profile.html</A>
"I love to sing-a, about the moon-a and the June-a and the spring-a"
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