You went to your first Broadway play or musical at some point, right? Come to opera.
Let us be clear: I take ten times more money for a concert than for an opera performance.
I have turned down soaps operas. I want to be outside, and I want to have the gun. It is cowboys and Indians to me.
I’m straight and always have been. When our family gets together, we joke about it or throw our hands up in desperation because there is very little we can do. If we make a big fuss about correcting these rumors, it just creates more attention and turns the whole thing into a soap opera.
You can be born with the talent to be an opera star, but you’ve got to work and practice it.
I watched a lot of soap operas, when I was growing up, and a lot of those great serialized soap dramas.
Soap opera wouldn’t be my first choice, but at this point in my life, I would consider a soap. It would allow me to act and still do other things with my life.
‘Star Wars’ is a grand soap opera, and ‘Star Trek’ is about technology, they tried to explain the reality of it, as far-fetched as it might be. And that’s why I’ve always liked the science behind the fiction.
People think top singers are overpaid, but opera houses have a top fee, which is a good thing. Of course concerts are different- everyone wants to make as much money as possible.
I got into cello in the fourth grade, and I played that for years. I adored playing it. I got an opera coach when I was 12 because I really wanted to learn how to sing properly. The only proper way to sing, I thought at that age, was opera.
‘The Phantom of the Opera’ is the biggest thing I’ve ever done, bigger even than ‘Cats’ which, in itself, I never thought we’d top.
‘iCarly’ gives me the luxury of addressing the fans directly. It was a sort of loving nudge to the fans saying, ‘We’re just a fun little sitcom to make you laugh.’ This isn’t a heavy-duty soap opera.
I have an opera coach who I went to as a teenager, when I was 15 and 16 years old. When I went to college, I forgot about it.
I’d want to play the Sydney Opera House.
I graduated from high school early so I could move to New York to do ‘A Little Night Music’ out of the New York City Opera.
Tiles, the best furniture, fabrics, bath fixtures, bronze – just leaf through any design magazine and you immediately understand they’re all ‘Made in Italy.’ We have the premier opera house in the world, La Scala, and behind the Nobel given to CERN is the research of many Italians.
I was not exposed to a lot of culture. The shows we saw in high school, like ‘Phantom of the Opera’ and ‘Miss Saigon,’ were thrilling. But my love affair with theater started with seeing a production of ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ that my sister was in.
Opera is a beautiful and important diversion for me.
Opera is the original marriage of words and music, and there’s a theatre element, a dramatic element. It’s right up my alley.
Political reporting is too often trivialised, treated as a soap opera based in Westminster, rather than placed in a broader social or economic context.
I don’t know, a lot of people go crazy about ‘Breaking Bad,’ but I don’t like the soap opera aspect of it and only following one character. I like the context to all of it, all the pieces, like ‘The Wire.’ It’s more about the state of things; it’s not about the narrative of a person.
It was the late ’70s when my parents met. My dad was a lighting director for a soap opera, and my mom was a temp at the studio. They moved into a house in The Valley in L.A., to a neighborhood that was leafy and affordable.
I’d love to have the time to learn to sing opera properly rather than bellowing half-formed fragments of melody in exuberant moments.
At the moment I’m enjoying a new challenge at the Royal Opera House, but I’m also keen to pursue my interest in television and particularly in science.
One can’t judge Wagner’s opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don’t intend to hear it a second time.
I know what I am able and not able to do. Fashion? OK. Fashion… clothes in theatre, in an opera, in a concert – all that I love. To make a movie myself… no!
My parents have always given me whatever I wanted. Took me to the ballet, the opera, museum exhibitions. I was always surrounded by art. It’s their fault I’ve become an actress.
Normally our season is seven weeks in the Drama Theatre and four weeks in the Opera Theater.
I became a set designer for opera. I’m a great opera buff, I love classical music, and I needed a time-out.
Grand opera is the most powerful of stage appeals and that almost entirely through the beauty of music.
In the early 1970s, I took singing lessons with John Hargreaves, a leading singer with English National Opera, when I was home from university.
I originally wanted to be an opera singer. I studied classical voice at the University of Washington but soon realised I didn’t have the instrument or the discipline. The road for opera singers is more difficult than for actors.
I think it was just an opera. Now, you go to opera, you expect to see and hear what the opera is. So, it was Catfish Row. It was singers. Marvelous voices. It didn’t make no difference what color they were.
Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.
It’s better to be on a soap opera to renew your career and following than to be on any other medium.
Wednesday a junior came to me, and told me I was to be hazed as I left the Opera House Friday night.
I live again the days and evenings of my long career. I dream at night of operas and concerts in which I have had my share of success. Now like the old Irish minstrel, I have hung up my harp because my songs are all sung.
Concert-going has become much less the thing to do, while people are still going to opera. This might be a harsh judgment, but it could easily happen that orchestras could slowly atrophy.
I’ve always felt that the comic strip medium stands equally beside all the other story telling mediums: novels, movies, stage plays, opera, you know, you name it.
Since I was eight years old. I didn’t have a TV, so comic books were definitely my television, my soap operas, and all that.
I had the working class ethic. I wanted to make a living and there weren’t many opportunities for an opera singer in Yorkshire, so I went onto the club circuit.
When I was in school, I was always writing scripts and dressing up as characters. I’d constantly be that guy who’d get up on stage. I used to write imaginary TV shows, like soap operas, for fun.
The Opera House guidelines have from time to time been amended, whether it’s for other sporting events or other causes. The guidelines have always been stretched in the part and the commercialisation of the Opera House has always been there.
Most of the soap operas always use the Christmas special to kill huge quantities of their characters. So they have trams coming off their rails, or cars slamming into each other or burning buildings. It’s a general clean-out.
In a totalitarian state like North Korea, a group of neighbors gathering once a week to watch the latest episode of a forbidden soap opera is committing a political act, and forming, with the market traders who deliver them this treasure, a rudimentary civil society.
I have tried to create main characters who are drastically different from the types who generally appear in crime novels. Mikael Blomkvist, for instance, doesn’t have ulcers or booze problems or an anxiety complex. He doesn’t listen to operas, nor does he have an oddball hobby such as making model airplanes.
My stepfather was quite into opera, but he’d play it when he was in a bad mood, so you’d hear this boom through the floor, Wagner, and you’d feel nervous.
A show like Knots or any other show that can be called a soap opera does terribly in syndication because if you’re a viewer and you miss a week you don’t know what’s going on.
To tell you the truth, I never listen to opera at home.
Opera is full of trappings that make us go away from being human. You can’t let them do that. You can’t walk like you’re in an opera! You have to make it real. You have to just be there.
The soap opera was so long ago – the thing about soap operas, and there’s something to be said for doing it, but you do a script a day. I don’t want to say it’s a training ground; it really isn’t, but what it does teach you is discipline.
People may have thought that we changed a lot. I don’t think we came in with that intention. Certain things I can’t stomach. But I tried to be as collegial as possible. When you sign that contract, you’re tied to that opera house to try your best. But every different team will play with a different intensity.
I like the idea of people coming to opera for the first time and finding it an enjoyable experience. I don’t like the fact that opera is seen as elitist and all black ties and that stuff.
My mother sang jazz and opera – she even performed at the Apollo on Amateur Night.
After I left college, I went to work at the Royal Opera House in London, which became a real catalyst for me because it made me realize that I was interested in cinema and in the way life is thrust at you. So I started making films.
I was playing this role on ‘Ugly Betty,’ the sweetest, nicest guy. He was a fun character to play, but I was in a Latin soap opera – where are you gonna go with a nice guy in a Latin soap opera?
