They like us! They really like us!
Dear Opera Chic readers,
Teatro alla Scala's chief legal counsel (they have an in-house legal office, lucky them, but then, as Il Foglio newspaper reported back on April 2, 2005, the La Scala staff is four times as large as the Metropolitan Opera's, even if La Scala doesn't stage four times as many events as the Met does and, we are afraid, the La Scala shows aren't four times better than the Met's. The La Scala tickets are more expensive but, thankfully, not four times as much as the Met's) has today asked Opera Chic in a terse but polite e-mail to change the Opera Chic website's logo because it supposedly creates confusion in the readers minds with La Scala's own official website, due to Opera Chic logo's similarity to La Scala's own logo (until a few minutes ago, now it has been replaced).
So, to be clear, dear readers, this is not the Teatro alla Scala official website: a new logo will make this fact clearer to even the densest readers on teh Internets: this site is not endorsed in any way by Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Opera Chic is in fact a one-woman, non-profit operation that chose not to run any ads despite (wink wink) several interesting offers.
La Scala also took issue with some other minor things: they don't want anybody to take pictures inside the theater before, during, or after the performances, and so they asked Opera Chic to take down from the site all and every photograph taken inside La Scala: we are working on removing those, too, so don't expect in the future any, "Angela Gheorghiu's moons the audience after they boo her the way that they booed her husband", because Opera Chic won't be able to publish that.
Also, Angela will probably not show up anyway for her (already sold-out) La Traviata engagement in July at La Scala, Opera Chic hears, so it's no great loss. (Remember, we're the ones who told you one week before his Aida walkout that Roberto Alagna was getting cold feet during his Aida rehearsals).
Unlike other opera houses that are happy to e-mail Opera Chic press releases and other for-publication material, La Scala does indeed read us, but does not like us, we are afraid. We'll have to live with that -- no Hanukkah greetings this year from La Scala! (But then, we didn't get their Hanukkah greetings last year either).
Text-based coverage on La Scala will obviously continue here, now more than evar: after all, when La Scala's own website was sadly down for an entire day just when they introduced the 2007-2008 season to the public, ie the most important day in the whole year for La Scala website to actually work, Opera Chic's small ship was sailing sweetly. Thanks to TypePad's cheapest account, we seem to be more reliable than La Scala's own server.
In other La Scala news, the production of Leonard Bernstein's Candide that was first canceled then reinstated after extensive rewrites by Canadian director Robert Carsen (the guy who said, "Candide is political, social and intellectual satire or it's nothing,") after extensive cuts to tone down its political and religious content, is still selling tickets very slowly. We'll keep reporting on that, too. It's not like we need a camera for that.
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Our sister-in-solidarity, NYC opera blogger extraordinaire La Cieca, feels our pain (also having been recently herself on the receiving-end of blog censorship)...and we ♥ ♥ her tags!
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Our dear Jessica Duchen, a sweetest friend and music critic for The Independent weighs in from London on the "sense of humour failure".
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Thanks for the solidarietà to the funniest/smartest ragazza romana, Giorgia of Opéra Bouffe, Photoshop genius and Pappano fetishist who joins the pro-OperaChic fray! Grazie grazie!