Renée Fleming and Alec Baldwin shared Love Letters during a Thursday night performance of the work by American playwright A.R. Gurney to benefit the Carnegie Hall Notables membership/ticket program for young music enthusiasts at Zankel Hall.
Opera Chic loves the angry, bloodcurling acting superpower of the hirsute Long Islander, who's undeniably one of our strongest actors who only needed three pages of Mamet dialogue to drill his way into the history of cinema (not to mention, that sweatily, Method-acted secks scene in the director's cut of Getaway is srsly srsly hawt).
The Lincoln of history -- as opposed to the Lincoln of hagiography -- had a taste, we know now, for a bawdy, salty brand of humor. Still, Baldwin's casting as Abraham Lincoln seems to OC to be at the very least counterintuitive.
Unless Philly asks Mamet to rewrite Lincoln's lines -- that would be so much fun.
Baldwin imagined himself as the restaurant critic of the Times;
the proprietor of an inn near Syracuse; and the presenter of a
classical-music show on public radio. “I could do that,” he said, and
he wasn’t exactly joking. He cares about classical music; he began to
take an interest in his twenties. (Perhaps not surprisingly, he adores
Mahler and can’t quite see the point of Mozart.) “To sit there in the
studio and just say”—a rich radio voice—“ ‘And now Tchaikovsky’s
Symphony No. 6, with Charles Dutoit and the Montreal Symphony
Orchestra.’
OC is partial to Yuri Temirkanov's, but Dutoit's a very good choice! A-B-C!