Men in tights, packing flutes
Going from Mozart’s Requiem a week ago to his Magic Flute last Friday was really looking at the extreme ends of the Mozart spectrum, and I haven’t crammed that much culture into one week since my last marathon weekend at the Shakespearean festival in Stratford.
Concerning the operetta, I don’t know what the prince was carrying in that oversized codpiece stuffed into his ballet tights, but I really enjoyed Opera Atelier’s version of The Magic Flute, as did the G&M’s reviewer. They did make Papageno completely and campily gay, so much so that I was expecting Papagena to be another man, but that provided one of the main comic themes of the operetta. The other fine comedic bit was that of Monastatos, the Moor who evilly and lustfully chases the princess around.
The voices and performances were outstanding, and the costumes were brilliant. They were backed up by the Tafelmusik Orchestra, also excellent.
Tickets have just been made available for a new, final matinee on November 26th.
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[...] The night of The Magic Flute, I met my opera companions at Linda for an early dinner. This upstairs dining room above Salad King is a really lovely place to enjoy deliciously prepared and elegantly served Thai food, although it’s a bit disconcerting the first time that you have to shove your way through the Salad King entrance, past the long communal tables of inexpensive but good Thai served downstairs, and up the stairs to the subdued lighting and calm of Linda. It’s definitely worth the trip, however, but make a reservation since the upstairs room is small. There was, in fact, a weird misunderstanding over our reservation: one of my friends had called to make it, and they’d even called her back to confirm that afternoon, but when I arrived there was no reservation for 3 on their books. We had a long conversation about why it wasn’t there before one of the senior staff said “well, we have a table for three available”. Duh, if you’d just said that in the first place, it would have saved a lot of time and aggravation! [...]