Word: opera
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Hayek is of Lebanese-Mexican decent and was raised in Coatzacoalcos, Mexico by her businessman father and opera-singer mother. She began her acting career as the title role in “Teresa” (1989), a hugely popular telenovela (Mexican soap opera), and later rose to Hollywood fame...
...Audiences, not least of all. Having drawn nearly 300,000 people to his arena operas at London's Royal Albert Hall, Freeman, 53, has helped revolutionize the art form from within. As founder of the Opera Factory, first in Sydney and later in London as part of the English National Opera, he earned his stripes as an avant-gardist, famous for stripping his singers - literally, as in his 1988 Cos? Fan Tutte set on a beach. (Amelia, Jaewoo and Emma, fear not.) But when The Magic Flute opens in Sydney this week, their talents will be similarly exposed. "I wanted...
...With an opera reveling in artifice, audiences may have trouble distinguishing the two at first. But Mozart's final and most popular work - in which Egyptian prince Tamino (Kim) is enlisted by the Queen of the Night (Farrugia) to rescue her daughter Pamina (Matthews) from a secret sect - is also about how appearances can be deceiving. And amidst all the stage pyrotechnics of the new production, Freeman's main focus has been on the singers. "If you don't change the quality of the central performances," he says, "you change nothing...
...Having first trained as an actor at Australia's National Institute of Dramatic Art, Freeman should know. He dropped out to direct, but the experience taught him the importance of long rehearsal periods, something he has campaigned for ever since. At the now-defunct Opera Factory, he was famous for training his singers in yoga, primal screaming and Butoh dance, and his productions successfully broke down the image of a singer plonked on stage. (Musically adventurous as well, Freeman will premiere a hip-hop opera based on the life of Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi for the ENO in September...
...Every now and then, the director drops back to view the scene through the frame of his hands. Such details will make all the difference when his vision is unveiled, and Freeman hopes it will share with Shakespeare the quality of being "both spontaneous and inevitable." But audiences (and Opera Australia) will be wanting more than that when the curtain rises this week. They're hoping Freeman's Flute will turn Mozart's music into theatrical magic...