La Fanciulla del West



(The girl of the golden west) by Giacomo Puccini, premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1910; the time frame is the gold mining era in California.  It’s a kick to consider something close to home “exotic,” but the rootin, tootin Wild West was intriguing to more sedate Western Europe. 

I attended a performance at the Hult Center in Eugene over the weekend, where the cast in full-costume mingled with the audience in the lobby before the show, (definitely at odds with the notion of opera being stuffy.  Oh, and they performed at intermission at the Emerald City Roller Girls on Saturday.)  Some members of the audience wore period costumes which added to the fun of people-watching. 

I’m always intrigued with set design at the theater and these sets were minimalistic, partly because there’s a large cast, and partly not to distract from the opera.  That’s conjecture on my part but it sounds logical.  The lighting seemed somewhat flattened, 2-dimensional, and coolly surreal.  The last scene reminded me of a bas relief.  It was wonderful.

The storyline is a classic western tale of good-hearted tavern-keeper, innocent just like Miss Kitty in “Gunsmoke’, a similarity I relate to my partner, who immediately denies ever seeing that show.  What?  I’ll explain in case I’m the only one who did watch; Miss Kitty and Minnie, our opera heroine, are pure in sexual terms.  They go as far as a kiss, and that was pretty racy. 

Oh yes, the music.  The cast included Emily Pulley, Raul Melo, and Aaron St. Clare Nicholson, from the Met. The acoustics are so good at the Hult; there was one poker playing scene where I could hear the actual cards being shuffled, so imagine how marvelous those powerful voices sound.  A love song during the third act brought tears to the eyes.  Wonderful.

After, we had a fine meal at Ambrosia, I'll spare you the menu. 

All in all, it was such a delightful day that I was saddened to see it end.     

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tastes like Chicken

Image
  Jim visited brother Dan in Palau mid 70s and came back with some wild stories of these gloriously beautiful tropical islands.  The ones that stuck with me are pretty much food related, go figure.  There was an open-air movie theatre in Peleliu filled with wooden benches for seating.  Rats were bold enough to scavenge food whenever, so movie viewers kept their feet up on the forward bench.   Hamburgers were served with a cabbage leaf for greenery, there being no iceberg lettuce on the island.  He met our friend Virginia there, she was maybe 13.  That girl took down fruit bats with a sling shot, a treat for her grandmother. They are a large bat species with a two-foot wingspan. She’d spot a roosting fruit bat hanging upside down from a tree branch, pop a small rock into the slingshot, eyeball the angle and let loose.  She had incredible aim.  She’d  nonchalantly balance in a squat to  husk a coconut wit...
Read more

Ethel strikes back

Image
  Grandma was a teacher and she drove the 18 miles from Powers to Myrtle Point every school day.  It’s a pretty drive on a narrow road that hugs the hillside high above the snaking south fork of the Coquille River, past high pastures and a few scattered houses. One day there went Ethel on her morning commute when she noticed “Howard Post” boldly painted on a large rock embedded in the hillside.  She kept going and there was another one.  Then another one. For a stretch of several miles young master Howard took it into his adolescent brain to spray paint his name on many, many exposed boulders in the hillside.   My grandmother’s solution to this embarrassment was to buy her own can of spray paint and on the way home that day, wearing a dress, (she wore only dresses then,) she stopped the car and over-painted every “Howard Post” she could reach.   It took many years for that paint to fade.  
Read more

Pasta ala Norcina from America's Test Kitchen

Image
I’m a fan of America’s Test Kitchen on PBS.   Any recipe from their site that I’ve cooked has turned out beautifully.   The great thing is they do all the testing and tweaking so all I have to do is follow the recipe.   At least the first time. A recipe for sausage and pasta recently aired.   I limit pasta in my diet these days, but every once in a while I’ll indulge.   And this recipe looked so good I made a mental note to cook if for Terry, being certain he’d love it. Then a friend who’d suffered a serious illness was released from the hospital, and here was my opportunity to give this a try.    I doubled the recipe, filled a large casserole for my friend, then one for Terry, and had enough left just for me, me, me.   And it is superb! Four fork review from all who were treated to this dish. It's not real pretty but the rosemary spiced sausage makes me forget that. Serves 6 White mushrooms may be substituted f...
Read more