Opera Chic

How To React To Bad Reviews, According To John Cleese: Don't Get Mad, Get Even

John Cleese -- who at this point pretty much hates everyone, bless him -- is now a contributor of The Spectator, and this is is first piece:

"However, there was a silver lining to receiving such consistently appalling notices in this magazine. Whatever one does, there will be critics who dislike it, and all one can do is to hope that they will write for journals with circulations as tiny as that of The Spectator 20 years ago. It also helps to know that such reviews will never be read by one’s colleagues in the creative arts, or, indeed, by anyone who might offer one work. So, a panning in these pages was only slightly more damaging than one in, say, the Zagreb Bugle.

...

To be fair (and it may be a little late for that), there may exist a few critics who, though unable to write, direct or act, have undergone some strange mystical process by which they have received transmission of a genuine understanding of these activities. Sadly, I don’t know who they are, because when I want to find out about a current production, I am lucky enough to be able to telephone a colleague who can write, direct or act.

Finally I’d like to make one critical comment:

John Cleese is a remarkably talented individual, of an admirably humble disposition, and a rare sweetness of temperament, who continues to tower over his contemporaries, especially Michael Palin (The Spectator).

After all, he's one of the men who wrote the definitive instructions on how to annoy people:

(And if you're one of the unhappy few who haven't Monty Python's awesomeness available to them in digital form 24/7, there's a blowout sale going on: 69% off a DVD box set with a two-disc Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Life of Brian, a two-disc The Meaning of Life, And Now for Something Completely Different, link here; and the complete box set of Monty Python's Flying Circus is only 49% off, link here).

And Now For Something Completely Different

Warning: this is not a joke.

Music Director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra Peter Oundjian and Monty Python's Eric Idle are cousins.

Apparently, they always wanted to work together -- at the beginning of the war in Iraq they discussed a musical comedy called Peter and the Wolf Blitzer --

"Then, a year or two ago – in the manner of all family histories, dates are open to discussion – Idle hit on what he thought was a perfect match for his skills and Oundjian's, and called his cousin with a plan. What the world needed, he thought, was an oratorio. Even better, a comic oratorio about a benighted schmo named Brian Cohen who has been misidentified as the Chosen One.

The end result of that e-mail will be on display in June, when Not the Messiah (He's a Very Naughty Boy), a collaboration between Idle and composer John Du Prez, performed with Oundjian and the TSO, makes its world debut as part of the Luminato Festival of Arts and Creativity in Toronto.

Fo' reals.