dirac

Everything is made far too easy now. I had to pound the pavement hunting down some of those things. I wouldn't really want to clog my shelves with some of those recordings, though. No one else has any favorite Callas recordings to recommend?

Jardine is a historian of distinction but I agree with you, Mashinka, that this article is not a terribly strong effort. She takes her time getting to her point and I couldn't say it was much of a point.

Jann Wenner is also scheduled, so it’s likely they will appear during the second part of the show. If anyone sees the show and has comments to make, may I suggest posting them to the existing thread in Writings on Ballet for Kavanagh’s book?

The man even stumbles gracefully. He's supposed to look awkward or clumsy every once in awhile, but I guess the space aliens who sent him here forgot to mention that. I do see what you mean, Mme. Hermine. Nureyev didn't always know where to stop - but then, if he'd been the kind of man who did, he probably wouldn't have flouted the Kirov authorities so boldly during that Paris engagement (to take only one example), wouldn't have been ordered back home, wouldn't have defected, etc., and the history of ballet might have been quite different.

Thank you for taking the time to post, Alymer. It’s appreciated by all of us. Your points about modern dance performances in Paris and the Tetley ballet are especially well taken, but all of these matters are worth raising. True. It may very well be that Fonteyn also had difficulty getting through Le Spectre – it’s a question of emphasis (and who Kavanagh talked to about the performance, I’m assuming she didn’t see it). Thanks for sharing that tidbit. What a lovely thing to say.

vagansmom, I'm an utter idiot, I read 'CD' for 'DVD' for some reason. As with the recital albums, most of my stuff was collected during the VHS era and I haven't rushed to replace them, so I don't know if these are on DVD. The Callas documentary made by Tony Palmer is good. The film of Callas live in Paris is also good, although she has a few bad moments, and there is also a film of her later Tosca live with Gobbi. I'll have to go check my shelves for more details, titles would be helpful I'm sure, but those are the ones that spring to mind.

I would recommend her second studio Norma, with Christa Ludwig and Franco Corelli. She’s not in as good voice as she was in her first recorded Norma, but she sounds okay, the recording is in stereo, and the supporting cast is superior. The first studio Lucia di Lammermoor with Giuseppe di Stefano and Tullio Serafin conducting is good, and the Lucia recorded live in Berlin with Karajan conducting is wonderful (keeping the sound limitations in mind) and her Covent Garden Traviata, also live, with Rescigno conducting is lovely, too. The studio Tosca with di Stefano and Tito Gobbi with Victor de Sabata conducting is one of the most famous opera recordings ever and justly so – I love it. Buy it. You won't be sorry. Her EMI studio recordings produced by Walter Legge are generally good, although unfortunately it’s mostly standard repertoire instead of the riesumazione bel canto she was making famous onstage (what wouldn’t I give for a good studio recording of her Anna Bolena). The ‘Manon Lescaut’ should be avoided, though. Most of my Callas recital stuff is not on CD – they’re on LPs taped onto cassettes, as I collected most of them before they came out on CD and never bothered to buy most of them again. I would recommend buying a copy of the late John Ardoin’s “The Callas Legacy” – it came out in several editions, you’d be looking for the last one, which I think was the third but I’m not sure. In any case, it’s well worth the price and an excellent guide to her recordings. There’s a “Qui la voce” from the early fifties that’s well worth looking for. Enjoy!

I meant that it’s a thankless role for Casares. It’s not that the role is in support, but that it’s limited and unsympathetic, to me at any rate, and not worthy of her. I wouldn’t say that Hunt is wasted as Miss Havisham, for example (or Evans in her brief role as Ma Tanner in the movie of Look Back in Anger, a small gem). They are all amazing. I’d seen good film acting before, but this movie was for me a revelation of what it can be. It’s fair to say that all too often the Lunts wasted themselves in such things, although they had a splendid farewell in The Visit. They are wonderful in The Guardsman, but without them there wouldn’t be much point. Irving Thalberg wanted them to come back and do a film version of the Maxwell Anderson play they're performing at the start of the movie. I doubt it would have been a masterpiece but it would have been interesting to see them in something a little weightier. Please do, ngitanjali.

Nobody else has read anything by Mailer that they'd like to mention?? Speak up, please.

Thanks, ngitangali, for starting the topic, and to everyone else who’s posted so far. I admire this, too, and it doesn’t get revived very frequently. I feel the same way about it. Maria Casares is wasted, and the child actor who plays the son deserves to be consigned to The Sound of Music, but everything else is miraculous.

I agree. She looks so very frailwith those huge eyes, and the fact that she’s pregnant just underscores her helplessness. I always thought those monkeys were pretty scary, too!

Thanks for posting, miliosr. I find Todd Haynes' movies to be interesting even if I don't always care for them - I wasn't as impressed by Far From Heaven as many were, but I'm glad I saw it. I'm sure Blanchett is excellent, but as she's acting in drag she's bound to get more attention than the other actors.... 'Enchanted' is receiving very good reviews and it sounds as if there are worse ways to spend a couple of hours.

Couldn’t agree more. I don’t know why the ballerinas don’t stage tantrums, the way Sally Field does in Soapdish when she has to wear a turban. (“Who am I? Gloria [expletive deleted] Swanson?”) A comb-over is not sexy, I agree (although General Lee was resorting to it in his forties and still looked very handsome, I must say), but personally I don’t find baldness sexy in general, it’s just – well, they’re bald, that’s all, poor fellows. I suppose if you’ve lost enough hair you might as well remove it all instead of going to desperate and possibly embarrassing measures, but I admit to some perplexity at this whole bald-is-hot thing. I think so too, GretchenStar, and welcome to the board, incidentally.

Well, he had hot pants for his idealized Dulcinea for one thing, and there were those who said he was crazier for Zorina than any other woman before or after. (On the other hand, the original Slaughter was also a job of work for him.) Arthur Mitchell said that Balanchine brought Ray Bolger in to coach him, so some continuity was clearly intended. The coaching sessions didn’t quite work out, Mitchell added, because Bolger’s style was unique to him and essentially untransferable, which sounds plausible, and so the choreography for Mitchell is probably not that close to the original. Going by what I’ve seen of this piece in clips, it’s no big deal, as this stuff was hardly Balanchine’s finest hour. Farrell looks pretty hot in the bits that were shown in ‘Elusive Muse,’ and regardless of what did or didn’t happen in her private life, as a performer I have the impression of a sexy lady who was well aware of the fact and used it in performance without being crude about it. Mitchell says in the movie that she had a little trouble at first with the shake-your-booty concept, but it looks as if she got into the swing of things. I think she also did it with Robert La Fosse when it was revived after Balanchine's death, possibly because of her hip injury? That was Balanchine's intention also, I suspect. The ballets he made on the two of them seem to have a blunter sexual charge than was customary. Faye wasn’t the most exciting performer but I love her voice. I prefer her version of 'My Man' to Streisand's, in fact. Tyrone Power was impossibly handsome in those days.

Thanks for posting, Alymer. If you have time, please do get to some of those mistakes beyond those already mentioned. This issue has not arisen in many of the reviews, and it’s important. Even a few would be appreciated by all of us,certainly by me, anyway. I’d say that all interviewees have an ‘agenda’ of some kind, in that they are human beings with their own prejudices and emotions (and no one witness will know or see everything - that person may not be trying to advance an 'agenda' but simply telling what happened as he perceived it). It’s the biographer’s job to sift through this vast quantity of remarks and try to figure out what’s true – or at the very least, accurate – and what isn’t. For some things you may have only one or two live witnesses and no other primary source to check against, making it even tricker. I haven't read the book, but the fact that Kavanagh had only one side of the correspondence is no reason not to use the material if it is valuable enough. The question is in how she used it (which I can't discuss, not having read the book yet). Not all biographical subjects are going to be very likable people – if that were the criterion then a lot of biographies wouldn’t get written. Nureyev was in some respects not a likable man, and there are things not to admire, as well (although I think some of the reviews may have made too much of this). I've read more than one interview with a biographer where the writer said, 'I started out admiring So-and-so, but the more I learned......"

Thanks, ngitanjali. Please report back. I love Jeeves and Wooster, too. That kind of farce has migrated to film, in so far as you find it at all, but Wodehouse defies adaptation to some extent (much as I like Fry and Laurie) - so much of the comedy is in how Bertie tells the story. Tell us what you think of Swann's Way. Which translation are you reading, BTW, or are you reading it in the original?

Lambarena sucks. Fortunately, San Francisco Ballet will also schedule it as the last ballet on the program, so I can get out before the crowd. I loved Diana when she was with SFB.

Ira Levin is dead at age 78. He was no Mailer, of course, but still - not a good week. A letter to the editor from Levin to the NYT, the last time, as it turned out, the public would hear from him.

That's a real screamer, all right. Authors, being human, do make mistakes, even some quite obvious ones, but you'd think during the editing process that would have gotten a red flag from somebody. Enjoyed your review very much, delibes.

I really liked Copeland in Berkeley. Cornejo didn't do much for me - maybe he's a little young for the role -- and you are correct about the slides. Also, you could see Copeland's jump coming from a mile away, and Cornejo had his jacket well on.

Neryssa, there are also the Balanchine biographies by Taper, Buckle, et al. I would also recommend Anatole Chujoy's 'New York City Ballet' published in the early fifties.

I don’t think O’Keeffe intended that particular remark to be provocative, just what was for her a statement of fact. Sometimes taking care of children, especially young children, is an impediment to work. (Yes, yes, it’s also wonderful, life enhancing, etc.) Men, however, usually have women back of them to mind the kiddies and perform domestic duties, and traditionally men are not expected to be primary caregivers for children.

Rodgers and Sondheim didn’t get on and neither one of them had much good to say about the show – I think Sondheim once called it a well formed dead baby. I still like the score, though, and I love the title song. (I also admire ‘We’re Gonna Be All Right,’ sung by Jennifer and Eddie in the second act, when it’s clear that they’re not gonna be all right. Rodgers threw out Sondheim’s original lyric for the song without any ceremony whatsoever. He had a good point, actually -- but, still.) I don’t think Rodgers’ lyrics are bad at all, actually. Without stopping to look it up, my recollection is that the Castle Walk is closely modeled on the original and adapted somewhat for Fred and Ginger. They also do a Turkey Trot and I think a foxtrot, which the Castles did much to popularize. I don’t know offhand if the waltz they do at the end was done by the Castles, although it has a period feel. The John Springer Astaire book and Arlene Croce’s book on Astaire-Rogers will have the relevant details. Sidwich? Irene Castle was a technical adviser on the picture. She and Rogers did not get on, either – Rogers refused to cut her hair as short as Irene’s bob had been, for example, and her costumes did not follow the originals as closely as Irene would have liked, etc., etc. I think she also made the point that the Castles' loyal valet was black (he was played by the very non-black Walter Brennan).

It’s why Scarlett is more interesting and fun than Melanie, and although Margaret Mitchell always denied it Scarlett owes a lot to Becky Sharp (although the former is far less malign a presence and usually more sinned against than sinning). I have not read Defoe since college and I’m now feeling deficient. I’ll get the book. Fanny and Edmund can be annoying – they seem to spend most of their time passing judgment on everybody else, and one can imagine them happily spending their married years tsk-tsking away at all and sundry – but I like them just the same. Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy are, for all their humanity, fantasy figures in a way that Fanny and Edmund aren’t. Austen pulls off a hat trick with great skill where the Crawford siblings are concerned. At first you’d mistake Mary for the real heroine of the novel, or at least the displaced one, until gradually her meretriciousness is revealed. You could still argue that Austen is too harsh, but she was always a tough customer, really. I think you're right about Hawthorne, but it's implied in Austen. Money is the unidentified leading character in most of her books. Actresses did have a kind of freedom that other women didn’t. They lacked respectability, but some acquired it eventually through an advantageous marriage, and in the mean time they were earning their own money, making their own decisions, seeing the world, and keeping their own names, even if they were also doing double duty as kept women.(On the lower levels of the profession things could be tougher.) One of the notable developments of the past century, I think, was the change in the status of actors both male and female from persons considered more than a little disreputable to something akin to royalty. Although there are still society decorators who won’t work for them.

No one has commented on this part since Estelle added it, so I thought I would.Seriously. Besides the obvious offense of the concept of a woman "unable to live without a husband," I wonder how their actual husbands feel about that. Can one imagine reading of a male dancer that "dance is like a wife (or husband), whom they cannot live without for long"? I don't think so. You know, until Estelle and you mentioned it I had completely forgotten about that line from Ms. Hampson. She must have been reading Byron: Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, 'Tis woman's whole existence.