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OPERA REVIEW
Diva on the Verge August 11, 2006
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Migenes Assoluta By Janos Gereben
Julia Migenes' show, Diva on the Verge, running through Aug. 20 in the York Hotel's Plush Room in San Francisco, will satisfy only three kinds of audiences: those who love opera, those who hate it, and everyone else. It's an 80-minute romp, on par with the best of Anna Russell's operatic antics. Migenes — a self-proclaimed grandmother, with the energy and figure of a cheerleader and an impressive list of credits in the world's opera houses — made her debut tonight in a 100-seat cabaret environment, the first such venue in the nearly decade-long run of Diva on the Verge.
To open the show, she advises "opera extremists" that they have landed in the wrong place — the show is aimed at those who avoid opera. After speaking freely about such operatic taboo subjects as age, weight ("divas with 300 pounds of cholesterol"), and mean conductors and directors, Migenes then launches into a manic evening of physical slapstick, fine vocal performances (supported well and with comic primness by pianist Victoria Kirsch), and comic highlights that convulse most audience members, regardless of their allegiances to the world of opera.
The redhead with the Rastafarian 'do (wild and elegant like Cleo Laine) tells and sings the story of Lucia di Lammermoor, "who stabbed her husband on her wedding night, but would be acquitted in L.A." She does an amazing quadruple-duty: She sings the Mad Scene, provides spoken translation between the notes, struggles with the sleeves of her costume ("What the hell?!"), and apologizes to those in the first row ("Did I spit on you?").
Migenes' illustrated lecture on "mature" singers, which portrays the 15-year-old Butterfly, 16-year-old Salome, and "11-, 12-, 13-year-old Walkyries," is both sidesplitting and instructive. Ditto for the portion of the show about death scenes, especially Violetta's demise in La Traviata, presented whole (complete with a towel-size 'kerchief soaked in blood, all the better to portray the ravages of tuberculosis).
The soprano performs Manon's death according to the direction of the ("I think German") director at Covent Garden, who made Migenes crawl across the entire stage while expiring. The single "serious" program item is Granados' "Muerto Cruel," sung simply and beautifully. The evening culminates in half-humorous "Liebestod" (if you can imagine that) from Tristan und Isolde, as Migenes acts out her Wagner-envy with surprising vocal excellence in a fach not really her own. A lace outfit ("made from the Hungarian lace curtain of my fourth ex-husband") helps considerably. All to the good, but there is a single highlight "worth the admission" (a cover price, ranging from $40 to $50) — the finale of Act 2 of Tosca. Migenes sings and translates, stabs and gyrates, while the pianist provides Scarpia's dying words. The performance comes close to spinning out of control, but slays the audience effectively nevertheless for some 10 blissful minutes of operatic belly laughs. Unlike early versions of Diva on the Verge, here Migenes speaks little of her career, and none of her personal history, which included an abusive alcoholic father, a mother in a psychiatric ward for a time, and the future singer placed in a foster home. At the shows in which Migenes talked about those experiences, she would follow the segment with Desdemona's aria from Otello, giving it an entirely different level of meaning. Nothing nearly that heavy occurs in the Plush Room, where it's all fun and music.
(Janos Gereben is a regular contributor to San Francisco Classical Voice. His e-mail address is janosg@gmail.com.)
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Julia Migenes
