Giuseppe Verdi, Francesco Maria Piave with additions Andrea Maffei | Macbeth / 2026 [The Metropolitan Opera’s HD-live production]

hitting the spot

by Douglas Messerli

 

Giuseppe Verdi (composer), Francesco Maria Piave with additions Andrea Maffei (libretto, based on the play by William Shakespeare) Macbeth / 2026, Gary Halvorsen (HD director), Louisa Proske (stage director) [The Metropolitan Opera’s HD-live production]

 

Yesterday, Saturday 17, 2026, Howard and I attended the highly acclaimed new Metropolitan Opera production of Macbeth.

    The last time we’d see a production was back in the 1970s at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The production in 1976, was by the famed Teatro alla Scala from Milan, with Claudio Abbado leading the La Scala Orchestra, with a quite remarkable cast with Piero Cappuccilli as Macbeth, Shirley Verret as Lady Macbeth, Nicolai Ghiaurov as Banquo, and Veriano Luchetti as MacDuff. We were young, and we were not wowed, both us now remembering only the witches waving rubber snakes in the air, not at all a memorable production for 29 and 30-year-old graduate students. You certainly might have though we would remember Shirley Verret!

     We still, after seeing yesterday’s performance, recognize that the opera—produced in 1847, before his first great successes such as Rigoletto, Il trovatore and La traviata, and which was revised and expanded in a French version, premiering in Paris in 1865—with several set choral numbers of the displaced Scottish peasants whose husbands, wives, and children have been killed, later in the opera, by the now tyrant Macbeth, looking more like displaced Italian peasants during the Napoleonic Wars than anything out of Scotland.

     Although the witches of this production most certainly did not wave rubber snakes in the air, they were certainly not as austere and terrifying as one might have imagined. Dressed mostly in beige, they looked more, as the head choral singer of the group told host Anthony Roth Costanzo during the intermission backstage conversation, like they were actually having fun in providing Macbeth with truthful but misleading prognostications: he will not be killed by a man born of woman, and his rule shall not fall until the Birnam Forest itself rises up against him. He therefore believes, vaguely, that he is impregnable. The head witch admitted they were indeed having more fun in this opera than all the others. Perhaps a little more austere production might have made us more frightened of them. As it is, they hover over the major actors like ghouls ready to remind them of the awful forces that control their inner selves. The demons in this work are clearly within us.

      Having with their own hands killed King Duncan, the Macbeths have now become paranoid enough that they must destroy Banquo, his son Fleance (who after all is prophesized as becoming his successor), and seek other the deaths of many others.  

      Concerning other problems in the direction, I’m not sure that the complexity of the set, including a turntable set moved to show not only the rough highlands, but several of the Macbeth’s palace rooms, was absolutely necessary or even fully offered us new insights into their complex lives as they move from the killing fields into their bedrooms, unable to wash the blood completely off their hands. At moments the set seemed somewhat cumbersome.

     All these minor quibbles aside, however, this was an absolute joy of an opera to watch with some of the greatest vocal offerings I have experienced in a very long while. With glorious voices such as the Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen as Lady Macbeth whose several major arias “Trionfai!” (“I have triumphed!”), the celebratory dinner song, “Si colmi il calice” ("Fill up the cup"), with elements reminding one of bell canto in it, and, of course, the truly great sleepwalking scene (“Una macchia è qui tuttora!”; "Yet here's a spot"), which Davidsen sings with such control that she can almost whisper her terrifying nightmares before truly revealing in full voice her and her husband’s horrific deeds before her lady servant and a male observer the servant has invited to witness the nightly spectacles.

     As opera critic Deryck Cook wrote in his essay of 1964, “Shakespeare into Music,” while again agreeing that Macbeth is not up to Verdi’s greater Shakespeare adaptations such as Otello or Falstaff observed:

 

“Only during the present Verdi craze could his Macbeth be seriously set beside its tremendous original. What can we make of a Macbeth who pursues his fatal vision through a musical desert of the old fustian recitative, or a Lady Macbeth whose prayer to be unsexed is a barn-storming martial cabaletta? In the "Grand scena di sonnambulismo."admittedly, Verdi did so magically stroke the big strumming guitar of his orchestra, and so chasten the vocal pride of Italian 'bel canto, as to foreshadow his achievements of some forty years later.”

      By this time Macbeth (Quinn Kelsy) himself is almost mad. But he is a man of guilt, we perceive, from the first moment he hears of the witches’ prophecies, arguing to himself that he must not interfere with fate, while ambition drives him to almost immediately commit the heinous crime from his early aria (“Mi si affaccia un pugnal?”; "Is this a dagger which I see before me?") to the beautiful and terrifying aria after he has seen the full implications of the witches’ predictions: (“O lieto augurio”; "O, happy augury! No wood has ever moved by magic power").

      His final great aria, in this production sung as he is dying, (“Cielo!”; "Heaven") admits that he knows no one will speak well of him after his death, and that he has ruined his life with ambition, hate, and fear is one of the most brilliantly performed works I have witnessed in my personal operatic history.

    But don’t leave Banquo out, who sings his one great aria (“Come dal ciel precipita”; "O, how the darkness falls from heaven") to his son Fleance as he suspects the journey they are making in escape is filled in danger. Baritone-bass opera singer Rayan Speedo Green sings this song with such a deep passion that he almost, at least for a few moments, upstages all the others. As he told Costanzo during the intermission conversation, “There is a lot of pressure on you since this in the only time in the opera when Banquo is permitted to wow the audience.” He most certainly does wow us with his great performance.

      A moment later, however, he perceives that he has been betrayed and insists he son flee as he, himself, is murdered.

      But in order to create such a wonderful production, one cannot ignore either the talents of Freddie De Tommaso as McDuff nor the truly great Metropolitan opera chorus, now directed by Tilman Michael. If you have ever wondered how to perform soldiers in battle, the wonderful action director Ran Arthur Braun has trained his dancers to perform acrobatic feats as they play out, almost in Japanese Kabuki style their war-time deeds.

      And, obviously, none of this would have made it across the stage lights without the truly great direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who with beautiful painted fingernails brings his baton to one of the greatest orchestras in the world, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. The truly wonderful thing about these HD productions is how alive the sound is on the large, fully amplified theater screen, better than even in the massive hall of the theater itself. The music is utterly overwhelming, and if you love opera and the nuances of the score this is how to best hear it.

      The audience applauded wildly, demanding a significant number of reentries of their favorite performers and choral groups. In her hurry to join the final bows, director Louisa Proske even lost her shoe, grabbing it and holding it on high as if it were her trophy for the brilliant afternoon performance.

      This is what opera is all about.

      This work, about tyranny, betrayal, greed, and unchecked ambition, is something we need to see again now in our own time, if for other no reason but to remind us that it too will some day come to an end and order return.

 

Los Angeles, October 14, 2026

Reprinted from World Theater, Opera, and Performance (October 2026).

 

 

Chris Housman | Hidin’ Somethin’ / 2025 [music video]

a housewife’s revenge

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chris Housman (composer and performer), Ford Fairchild (director) Hidin’ Somethin’ / 2025 [4 minutes] [music video]

 

This recent music video by country-style gay composer and singer Chris Housman consists of a simple revenge story right out of Alfred Hitchcock’s famed TV series, although perhaps this is a bit more perverse than even the master of murder and mayhem might have imagined.

      In bed together after spending the night love-making are too heavily tatted men, Housman and Gable LaDuke, the later playing the lying husband of preacher’s daughter Brauwyn Spinner. Housman wonders where, suddenly his night-time lover is on his way to. LaDuke simply mumbles something about the fact he has to do something that day, even though supposedly it’s his day off from work. However, he accidently leaves behind his wallet, and Housman discovers, picture by picture, the real truth through a picture and a hidden wedding ring.

   We quickly discover where he’s headed as we observe his wife (Spinner) reading an old love letter from another man she’s discovered in a box. From there on the song takes over, recounting her love and sacrifices for the man that all this time has been ‘hidin’ not only ‘somethin’,’ but his entire identity as a bisexual, gay-oriented man who has betrayed his wife and family.

     She cooks up a special pot pie which quickly puts him in a hidden grave, dug by hand, making her another person is now is “hidin’ somethin’.”

      But the whole story told in the lyrics about how many years she has put up with his “beatings and the cheating that…put her through hell,” reveals her fury and supposedly justifies her culinary murder.

     The heavily inflected voice and instrumentation on the chorus which repeats “hidin’ somethin’” is a powerful reminder of what is truly at issue in this musical narrative, again directed by Housman’s usual partner, Ford Fairchild.

 

Grew up at the crossroads of a preacher's daughter and a farmer’s wife

She thought she found a one woman man to love her ‘til the day she dies

But 30 years in, done raising his kids, and keeping his front porch swept

She found a box full of letters, he shoulda been better at hiding those secrets he kept

He finally found one hole that he can’t get out

‘Cause she’s got a shovel and a whole lotta ground

She goes way out where the lord can’t see

She ain’t weeping under those willow trees now

He’s getting what he had coming

She’s serving that backwoods justice

By the time that the sun comes up

He won’t be the only one hidin’ somethin’

She could take the beatings and the cheating hell that he put her through

But everything hit different when she read ‘bout the other folks he left black and blue

So on Sunday night, made his chicken pot pie, and she threw a little something else in

By the time it got dark she was rolling up a tarp, his cold heart won’t be beating again

 

‘Cause he’s found one hole that he can’t get out

‘Cause she’s got a shovel and a whole lotta ground

She goes way out where the lord can’t see

She ain’t weeping under those willow trees now

He’s getting what he had coming

She’s serving that backwoods justice

By the time that the sun comes up

He won’t be the only one hidin’ somethin’

 

     Clearly Housman has no sympathy whatsoever for the millions of men whose gay sexuality is kept a secret from their wives, family, and, at moments, even themselves.

 

Los Angeles, July 24, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).

Hannah Gadsby | Nanette / 2018

 speaking up

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hannah Gadsby (writer), Jon Olb and Madeleine Parry (directors) Nanette / 2018

 

As philosophers and others such as Henri Bergson have long argued, laughter—although seemingly giving us pleasure—is not always grounded in joy, but much like growling, is often a way we have of dealing with the tension between reality and what we would like to be the truth. As comedians well know—John Osbourne showed us this in his The Entertainer, just as Robin Williams demonstrated it in his suicide—comedians are not always happy folks, often using humor as a kind of armor, deflecting their own feelings of insignificance and fear to hide what they most feel inside.

      The wonderful Tasmanian-born stand-up comedian Hannah Gadsby explores this territory in her performance titled Nanette, which is filled with laughter but also with a great deal of anger, aimed particularly at self-privileged males.

      Born lesbian into a society that simply did not accept the idea of homosexuality, time and again, throughout her youth, she was awarded for her successful golf tournaments with dishware, while the male competitors were given money and other more solid awards. Her grandmother, she quips, kept telling her that “Mr. Right was just around the corner,” forcing her to be very warry about the corners in her life.

      Gadsby takes the opportunity of her stand-up show to help educate us about comedy and how it works. She argues that basically a comic line depends on a two-part structure, the short narrative which builds the tension and the release of that tension with a quick twist in the tale.

      Yet Gadsby’s performance, in this case, is basically written in three parts, the first of which—part of the build-up—reveals the problems of her childhood, those problems, as in most comedy conclude with quick zingers that shuffle those problems into another dimension, as we, seemingly with her, laugh them off.

      In the second part, this skilled dialogist, suddenly declares that she may be giving up comedy, as she explains the nature of a joke and how for all these years she used those quips to protect herself from having to actually face those childhood difficulties. Still, she allows some remarkable releases, allowing us to share some of her informative explanations of her craft in between bits of laughter.

      By the third part of her amazing “talk,” one that bears similarities to another comic-dialogist, Spaulding Gray (who also committed suicide, he by drowning), Gadsby switches gears, letting out the very anger which has allowed her to deflect the truth over and over again, and turning against the male aggressors in her life, whether passive simply in the male presumptions of priority or active in what appears to have sexual abuse (she insistently names no names and refuses to indicate what relationships these men might have had to her), but as she recently mentioned in an interview with The New York Times, this film-version of her piece was the very most difficult since her mother in the audience.

      What we have previously released in our growls of laughter now quickly turns to tears, particularly if you have any empathy, which even uncomfortable straight men in the audience should have developed by this time given the amazing talents she already revealed. Many critics have characterized this last section as going “beyond” comedy, of taking the genre into new territory. But I might suggest that she is simply returning to the first part, the narrative build-up, but projecting with an entirely different lens, of opening herself up to show us the real pain and suffering she endured for all those years. Instead of continuing to protect herself through the armor of laughter, she has permitted herself to talk to us straight-forwardly, to ask us to truly hear her pain and anger that she still retains for having to suffer in silence for so many years.

     As she insists: “You wrote the rules, and I read them!”

     I was startled, I admit, to hear her report that as a child she become silent, seemingly appearing to be shy and unsocial, when she obviously was a quick-witted, intelligent woman. Just the week before I had read an op-ed piece in The New York Times by Guy Branum, describing how, even as a young man, his obviously effeminate gay voice while growing in Sutter County, California—a place clearly not that very different from the Tasmanian island of Australia—altered his behavior, as he puts it:  

 

                   By the fourth grade, I learned that there was something about me that

                   made me audibly different from the other boys my age. I could not mask it,

                   I could not change it, I could not fight so well that I could earn the

                   respect of my classmates. My voice evoked rage and disgust from

                   my peers and teachers. I kept it hidden and tried to fit into a role that did not

                   fit me. I played football, I tried to date girls. None of it worked, so I

                   became quiet, very quiet, for a long time.

 

     And suddenly I recalled a piece I’d long ago written about my own childhood, something to the effect, after being terrified on the playground by the school-yard bully, that for years after I grew silent, turning in to read, write, and dream in private. I am sure that no-one who reads this today might ever believe it! When you're quiet for so many years, perhaps you feel you have to make up for it.

     I was, nonetheless, still a privileged male, and was never abused by a grown-up that I know of—except for my father’s almost hysterical view of homosexuality. And Gadsby is still very righteously angry at a time that I realize I led a rather fortunate gay life. We all adapt differently to the bigotry against lesbianism and gay life. Moreover, things have changed much, if not yet sufficiently.

     I think Gadsby’s moving performance ought to be perceived as both a Kaddish for all the lives of those in the LGBTQ community who have been traumatized by the dominant heterosexual world and, particularly during the AIDs crisis, even died for their sexual identities. Here, finally, we have a new conversation that needs to be heard and at least listened to by even those who may feel uncomfortable by its truth. Simply being quiet or laughing, for that matter, is no longer a solution.

 

Los Angeles, August 1, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2018).

Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics), George Furth (book) | Original Cast Album: Company / 1970 [documentary]

for the record

by Douglas Messerli

 

D. A. Pennebaker (director) Original Cast Album: Company / 1970 [documentary]

 

Yesterday, exhausted from several days of watching very intense LGBTQ feature films, I awarded myself the opportunity of viewing the noted documentarian filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker’s Original Cast Album: Company. The film was to have been the first in a series of such cast recordings, and received excellent reviews; the producers, however, in the meantime had been hired by MGM, and the series, most sadly, never occurred.

     We have only this “pilot” work, but what a memorable film it is! Criterion, which has re-released the film, most recently with commentary by critic Frank Rich, composer/lyricist Steven Sondheim, and Elaine Stritch, and others, listing it among their LGBTQ films; so it seemed to offer the perfect excuse for me to rush back into the arms of Broadway theater. Yet there is little outwardly “gay” in this production. Indeed, except for composer/lyricist Sondheim and the musical librettist George Furth, I don’t know of another artist in the work who is openly gay.

     The original cast album was recorded just a few weeks after the show’s opening as most such albums are, when Jones had not yet left company which he would shortly after due to the stress of his divorce proceedings with his then wife Mae Entwisle after nearly 17 years of marriage. Although Jones performs a remarkable couple of takes of the third act solo “Being Alive” and a quite touching version of “Barcelona” with Susan Browning—Sondheim even arguing that not only was that performance of “Being Alive” his best but that no one did it better*—that actor, who later became a born-again Christian, has never been one of my favorite performers.

      Now if the film had featured the terribly gifted but unfairly overlooked Larry Kert (the original Tony on Broadway’s West Side Story) who replaced Jones soon after, that would have truly made it a “gay film.”

      Kert was a particular target of the notoriously mean-spirited Jerome Robbins who kept calling him a “faggot” throughout rehearsals, despite the fact that Robbins and most of the male dancers were also gay; obviously Kert didn’t even attempt to hide his gay sexuality. He died, as so very many of the greatest talents of the time, of AIDS in 1991, leaving behind his lover, Bill Pullen.

    Only later, in England, did they dub in Kert’s performances for Jones’ on the recording. But the one we hear in this film is Jones as the central character, “Bobby, baby, bubbie,” beloved by all but in love with no one until he sings the two songs noted above. Although one of his male friends suggests a possible gay relationship with him in the musical, that conversation was, of course, not among this album of songs.

     Although the musical opened to some quite negative reviews, and, early on, was in danger of closing, it eventually ran for a long run of 690 performances, finally fully introducing Sondheim in Broadway as a significant composer, not just a lyricist, who would soon change the very nature of the medium through his introduction of darker, more complex themes, music, and lyrics that those than the musical theater productions that came before.

     One of the most difficult songs to perform is “You Could Drive a Person Crazy,” sung by Donna McKechnie, Susan Browning, and Pamela Myers, which, with its close harmonies and fast- talking lyrics, is easy to flub. We see this song, which surprised even a long-time pro like Thomas Z. Shepard, the record producer, in its complexities, performed several times before they get it right.

      Similarly, and even more difficult to perform is the brilliant patter song “Getting Married Today,” sung by Beth Howland. This tongue-twister is surely the tour-de-force regarding the combination of simply singing the lyrics and enunciating them fully enough to have them comprehended, at which amazingly Howland succeeds. She married Charles Kimbrough, who played Harry in this production.

       And Pamela Myers, in “Another Hundred People,” discovers for the first time that she has changed an F-sharp to an A of Sondheim’s original score, and now sings it correctly, Sondheim getting what he wrote down on the record, so to speak. This song I have always believed intimates some of the chordal developments and even lyrics of Sondheim’s later Sweeney Todd, particularly when early in the song she sings the elongated line “It’s a city of strangers,” with great similarities to Sweeney Todd’s “City on Fire.” Both serve as cries of the dangers of the urban space which many of Sondheim’s works celebrate, but with always the Bernstein-like lament for the need to escape to “a place for us,” free from those dangers. And Company, in particular is a nearly claustrophobic world in which Bobby cannot even escape his friends in his deepest most private desires and thoughts until he finally refuses to attend the celebration for his birthday, and leave the ever-present “company” behind.

       The major piece of this film, however, is its last. After everyone else has finally left the Columbia Records studio at East 30th Street and Third Avenue at around 3:00 in the morning, the orchestra, Sondheim, Furth, Shepard, Hastings and the orchestra remain behind with Elaine Stritch to perform the final number, “Ladies Who Lunch,” she having given over her earlier scheduled time to Jones.

       Having heard this song sung by Stritch now so many times, I can recognize almost immediately how tired and stressed the singer is. Sondheim, in retrospect, suggests in was one of those times where she kept drinking a few sips of alcohol just give her the courage to continue going on, and by the time of her song, was drunk enough that she couldn’t live up to the demands of the song.

      The composer insists she first bring down the song into a lower key in order to not hurt her voice. She sings it lovingly and knowingly, but it’s “flaccid,” as Shepard puts it, slower than its usual pace, perhaps even a little better narratively expressed, but without the zest of protestations of those shallow ladies who try to do everything imaginable to fill in their empty lives. By the end of the song, even Stritch can hardly “rise, rise, rise” to full occasion of her narrative dismissal of the lot.

     She sings it again, making it even worse. And again, back in the original key, attempts to belt it out. We are witnessing the difference between a great performance and several mediocre ones. If there was ever an example of that important difference in defining the greatest of both a performer and this series of performances is revelatory.

       At nearly 4:00 a.m. on a Monday morning, they finally tell Stritch to go home, almost against her protests. They have the orchestra play the piece without her. And the film ends the next day, as a rested Stritch, made up for her evening performance, stops by the studio to sing it the way it should be sung, layering her version over the previous recorded orchestral one. Stritch seems also a little fearful, even after her performance, that they still may cut it. But they assure her that everything is now as perfect as any such a recording can ever be.

      As cameraman Jimmy Desmond states, no one could have imagined that such an event would be quite so dramatic; and indeed, as Pennebaker agrees, it’s the perfect film taking only one day and night.

 

*After writing this essay, I did a comparison listening to four of the major singers of this song, Dean Jones, Larry Kert, Raúl Esparza, and Neil Patrick Harris. The results were surprising. Far and away, the best dramatic version was sung by Dean Jones. Sondheim and others had been on target in their evaluations. Esparaza was the most dramatic and often terribly effective, but there was just too much self-consciousness involved with his performance, and his voice as not as lyrical as was Jones’. Larry Kert had the very best voice with remarkable clarity, but there was no depth to his “Being Alive,” which he sung almost as a ballad instead of a discovery of the true contradictions he was suddenly to terms with. Surprisingly, Neil Patrick Harris did a commendable version of it, although it was definitely the weakest of the four. The prettiest version was by yet a fifth singer, John Barrowman, who sang the role of Bobby at the Kennedy Center. But this was from a song album and truly is not comparable with a theater production performance; it was lovely to hear, easy on the ears, and beautiful to listen to, but had next to nothing to do with theater. There are two illegally photographed versions of the Kennedy Center performance on YouTube, unbearable to watch and impossible to listen to. When will people comprehend that such “snapped” performances are not only a crime but truly are a disservice to the artist.

 

Los Angeles, September 6, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).

John Jarboe and Stephanie Blythe (screenwriters), John Jarboe (director) Blythely Oratonio in Blythely Ever After / 2020 [TV video]

 the night she sang opera in drag at a karaoke bar

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Jarboe and Stephanie Blythe (screenwriters), John Jarboe (director) Blythely Oratonio in Blythely Ever After / 2020 [TV video]

 

As part of Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series at The Appel Room, popular Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe takes on a drag role, one of the many “beards” she’s played throughout her long career, Blythely Oratonio, a somewhat intemperate tenor who she first met while selecting mustaches for one her roles and later encountered again for a full evening at a karaoke bar, in what Blythely describes as one of the best nights of his life. Backed by up his band, The Fluffers, his non-gender performing “Birdies” (Messapotamia Lefae and Sav Souza), and his “Flowers” (Hailey McAvoy and Margaret Tigue), Blythely plays a gay man who not only knows his Grindr inside out, but throws out various gay slang terms, some of them so crude that most opera singers might not even whisper them in the dark.

     As critic Brady Schwind observes in BroadwayWorld:

 

“Bearded, bejeweled, and ready for battle in a Trojan headdress, it's patently clear from his first entrance that Oratonio, in his first American Songbook appearance, like the best of all opera heroes (and antiheroes) will take no prisoners. But lest we forget, tenors are also sensitive, fragile creatures; the inflated symbol of importance in an art form steeped in such an antiquity of tradition, it's continually pegged as a likely candidate for extinction.

…. Such a presentation, at first blush, might be the kind of grand and over the top drag exploitation, you'd expect from (at best) The Box or (at worst) America's Got Talent. Oratonio, with his band The Fluffers, merges expected mind-bending classical vocals with (what's become rather boilerplate) anachronous cross over pop anthems likely on heavy rotation at your local karaoke bar. Imagine Pavarotti doing Rick Springfield's ‘Jessie's Girl’ as a Mozartian baroque and you get the idea of the musical vocabulary and running gag of the evening.”

 

      As one might expect from such a figure, Blythely goes back in time to tell of his childhood attractions, which elicits “Jessie’s Girl,” to far more broad-minded pursuits, discovering his true self. Early in the hour-long concert and chatfest, Blythely sings passages from Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” that are so perfect, I wanted to hear him sing the entire piece, but as he prone to do throughout, he quickly intertwines that work flawlessly with the call of another clown, singing from “Vesti la giubba” by Leoncavallo.

     Barry Manilow’s “Could Be Magic” alternates with Puccini’s “Recondita armonia,” and Delibes’ beautiful flower duet, sung by his “Flowers,” becomes an occasion for several testimonies from celebrities, including Stephanie Blythe herself, as well as the tenor taking a few deserved bows.

     Surprises in Blythely’s choices of music abound, as when he sings, quite stunningly, Toni Tennille’s and Daryl Dragon’s “Gentle Stranger,” and the next moment drifts off into Offenbach’s “Barcarolle.”

     But despite the musical wonders Blythely calls up, it is often his personal revelations that tug deepest on the heart, particularly when he describes in graphic terms the moment he realized, on the toilet no less, that he could he can no longer “carry an expiring maid while singing a high D.” Elsewhere, Blythe, as herself, has admitted that after menopause, “my voice started moving lower and lower, and I’ve worked to develop this lower range. It’s a natural progression because of hormonal changes, and I’ve chosen not to fight it.”

      And there is throughout Blythe’s Blythely’s choice to explore the sometimes fluid shifts of sex and gender of operatic characters, as Schwind points out, such as the macho Valkyries and the loving male duo of “Nessun Dorma." Blythely’s operatic songbook, indeed, has no reason to exclude a glam rock musician such as David Bowie, whose “Changes” she sings quite admirably, or the opera-loving Freddie Mercury,* who himself pushed his music toward the oratorio. She closes her show, in fact, with his “We Are the Champions,” with the audience’s full knowledge that the “we” of which Blythely sings are far more diverse than the more conservative opera-goers might ever imagine that pronoun to be.

     What I would now truly like to hear is a full night of Blythely singing Broadway tenor solos.

 

*Mercury first met Spanish opera singer Monserrat Caballé in 1987, and in 1988 released an album with her, Barcelona.

 

Los Angeles, May 11, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).