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Cinderella gets the opera treatment at Town Hall Theater

Posted on May 23, 2019 | 

• Middlebury
 
• Featured
 

By David Weinstock

SOPRANO CREE CARRICO, pictured center, plays La Fée (The Fairy) in Massenet’s “Cendrillon,” which will be performed at Middlebury’s Town Hall Theater through June 8. Independent photo/Steve James

MIDDLEBURY — The Opera Company of Middlebury, now in its 16th season, has mounted another classic opera, updated for the modern audience. Jules Massenet’s “Cendrillon, a Fairy Tale in Four Acts,” directed by OCM artistic director Doug Anderson, is a full production with orchestra, sung in the original French.

Don’t speak French? Don’t worry. Every word of dialogue and song is translated into English, visible on a screen above the stage and synched to the action. But if you’d rather ignore the supertitles, rest assured that “Cendrillon” is  the same Cinderella story you’ve heard since childhood.

Lucette, known as Cendrillon and sung by soprano Lindsay Ohse, has been reduced to little more than a servant in the home of domineering stepmother Madame de la Haltière (Tara Curtis) and two haughty stepsisters, Noémie (Abigail Paschke) and Dorothée (Heather Jones). Her own father, Pandolfe (Andy Papas) is helpless to shield his daughter from their scorn and mistreatment.

IN THIS PRODUCTION, the glass slippers are a pair of very shiny sneakers. Below, Cree Carrico and her ensemble look over a sleeping Cendrillon, played by Lindsay Ohse.

Independent photos/Steve James

Then comes word that Prince Charming (tenor John Riesen) is hosting a grand ball and — if he obeys his father the King (Eric Kroncke) — will choose a wife from among the kingdom’s eligible high society young ladies. Lucette dutifully dresses her sisters for their royal audition. But when left alone, she sings about longing for love and wishes she had been allowed to go to the ball. Finally, exhausted, she takes a nap, and in comes La Fée, or Fairy Godmother (Cree Carrico) who does what only fairy godmothers do. She wakes Lucette to fulfill her heart’s desire, gowns her magnificently for her palace debut, and throws in a pair of enchanted slippers that will magically conceal her identity from her jealous stepfamily. There’s only one catch: Lucette must leave the party at the stroke of midnight.

As it turns out, Prince Charming is acutely bored with the whole dreary business of being a prince and has zero interest in marriage. He meets one wannabe princess after another, sees nothing he desires, dances with nobody, and dismisses every candidate, not at all charmingly; in fact, he is quite rude.

Then, in walks Lucette, and it is mutual and sudden love at first sight. The rest of the company, quickly sensing that the party is over, leaves the pair alone together to sing, dance, and proclaim their love. Lucette flees at midnight, leaving behind in her haste one of the magic slippers, giving the prince his only clue to her identity. (In case you are wondering, Ohse wears a size 10 slipper.) It takes two more acts of glorious music to bring the two together, and they all live happily ever after.

The Opera Company of Middlebury has put our small Vermont town on the national opera map. The company has become a highly desirable gig for opera singers nationwide. This year, when auditions for “Cendrillon” were announced, OCM heard from 500 singers and 33 talent agencies.

OCM’s auditions are unique and are an important element of the company’s success.  “You go and sing an aria, that’s the normal part,” says Ohse, “but then they say, ‘Come on up, have a seat. We want to just talk to you! Which just doesn’t happen anywhere else.” Ohse revealed her hobby of privately playing all of her opera roles on her ukelele, and as you’ll see, Anderson incorporated ukeleles into the production.

“I also had a dream audition,” Riesen said. “I sang Romeo’s aria from Gounod’s ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ But then they asked if there was anything else about me that they should know. I told them ‘I went to college to play baseball before I could sing at all.’”

Then Riesen sang “What You’d Call a Dream,” a touching memory of a baseball player’s golden moment from the musical “Diamonds.” All six auditioners were left in tears, and he got the part as Prince Charming.

Cendrillon opens Friday, May 31, at  7:30 p.m., at Town Hall Theater in Middlebury with a prosecco reception to follow. Performances continue on June 6 and June 8, at  7:30 p.m., and a 2 p.m. matinee on Sunday, June 2. Don’t miss it!

Carrie Dickason Art

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/19/female-painters_n_4468211.html

Do not fear your responses to liking what you see. In this first line line is a link.....please....click it and see New Art!!!  No I am not begging anyone to buy more art,  I am bribing you, enticing you to have a reaction to this piece so that you can feel....Take a look at what is being done in this picture..... The lines are the same as your eyes moving through a room in real time but they are converted into dimensions of color....with your eye's, yes, which are attached to your brain and not your phone..... ;the color or the absence of it, in the case, of the white squiggles, in Voices of Space 2013 and The 'soc' 2013 are expressions of 'feeling' with line color and movement in response to what happens deep inside the brain.  Great titles...Painting is beautiful...it is beautiful to paint....

 I am throwing down this basic thought that we can still make abstract art like this over and over again.  We can kill abstract painting and bring photo realism into the focus (which somehow is more real to some), like wars fought and civilizations remade and defined again with loss and radical expression:   Throw it down here relates to the Post Action Painters like Justine Hill, who give us the providence and bliss of the visual, from which the pains through their process, methods and reactions with each stroke, recreate emotion and light. 

 Use the material how you will Justine Hill, and search every eye catching moment to create your colorful realities.... beautiful art....ahhhhh.

http://justinehill.com/home.html

These two links share a bit about two artists you should know about as they relate to what came before Justine Hill in the history books....please comment and be open.  LOL Jean

http://www.cwhf.org/inductees/arts-humanities/helen-m-frankenthaler#.Vn8JnMArKP8

http://arthistory.about.com/od/glossary_a/a/a_action_painting.htm

Throwdown #1

All art is a series of recoveries from the first line. The hardest thing to do is put down the first line. But you must.    -- Nathan Oliveira 

So here is a new blog about art, and here is  my first line.

Art is as vital and essential to human life as water, oxygen and food. If all the art vanished, it would mean more than empty museums and galleries. It would mean empty lives.

You don't need to be an artist or an art collector or an art critic to understand this. Look around yourself, wherever you are right now, and subtract, one at a time, every bit of visual art. The paintings on the walls go first, of course, but then there are the walls themselves: who mixed that shade of paint? The windows with their curtains and blinds, what makes them windows instead of raw ragged holes in the wall?

Keep looking, left to right, floor to ceiling, and as you go, mentally obliterate everything shaped by art, by design, by our thousands of human years of sorting out what we can bear to look at and what we cannot, what pleases us and what pains us. Continue until you must stop.

Then go make some art. Start with the first line.