Mae West: Gluck

Here in New York, NY — the hometown of MAE WEST — the Metropolitan Opera’s 2006–07 season just ended and critics have begun to throw darts.
• • Designer Mark Morris showed his affinity for pop culture in his staging of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice [one of the seminal works in the opera canon] by putting Mae West in the chorus. Yes!
• • Orfeo ed Euridice tells the Greek myth of musician-poet Orpheus, who is grief-stricken after his bride Euridice dies. Pitying Orpheus, Jove invites him to retrieve her from the underworld on one condition: Orfeo may neither look at Euridice nor explain anything as he leads her back to earth, however, he does look back and she dies again.
• • Gluck’s rendering uses three individual characters in the opera — Orfeo, Euridice, and Cupid — along with the all-important chorus.
• • Arts reviewer Heather MacDonald writes that "it was difficult to experience the work’s full profundity with the chorus tricked out like Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band." MacDonald describes the scene: Arrayed on three rows of a large industrial scaffold, each chorus member was costumed and made up as a historical figure, no matter how banal. Next to Abraham Lincoln and Gandhi were MAE WEST, Liberace, John Lennon, Hiawatha, and Mao. The chorus was supposed to be a “witness to history,” according to the designers, but the effect was as tacky as a wax museum. It is inconceivable that Mae West would sing Gluck’s finely-wrought dirges.
• • Occasionally, Mark Twain, Karl Marx, or other animatronic wonders would jerk out their lower arms, matching the spasmodic movements of the dancers. ...
• • Source: The City Journal [Spring 2007 issue]
• • Byline: Heather MacDonald
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
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Mae West.