German opera lovers weren’t loving the gay twist director Krzysztof Warlikowski amplified in Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s classic, Eugene Onegin.
Gay cowboys and drag queens doing erotic dances find their way into Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” in Munich. The Polish stage director, Krzysztof Warlikowski, turns this classic romance into a gay love triangle, and was roundly booed for his efforts at the premiere.
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Warlikowski pushes the composer’s own tormented homosexuality into the foreground and queers the pitch for his characters.The real relationship in this production is between Lensky and Onegin. The duel scene finds them in bed together, with what looks like the cast of Brokeback Mountain lurking at the back of the stage (a motel room and petrol station clearly visible — sets and costumes from Malgorzata Szczesniak)… An exploration of the two men’s relationship is legitimate, since it is one of the opera’s deepest and certainly its most tragic. With more subtlety and professionalism, it might have worked.
Everyone’s a critic!
Rt. Rev. Dr. RES
Obviously, this critique is from some individual, some German critic, who saw the work. Since one has not seen the work, but only have the description, I should only accept it at face value.
Hollywood treatment of Michelangelo or Tchaikovsky were realised by Moses/Ben Hur and Dr. Kildare. The former is the NRA theofascist who of course portrayed the painter/sculptor as straight; as did the long openly-closeted Richard Chamberlain whose views on LGBT rights suggests his age and generation when his early adulthood was spent in denial because of “immorality, abnormal psychological protocol, and entrapment in gay bars themselves, who made T’s heterosexual adventures.
This overreaction may be an overadjustment to the formerly straight rewrites.
Stew
I’ve been obsessed with Tchaikovsky since I was about 5 and have read Puskin’s Eugine Onegin about 4 times… I’m not convinced this production would of done either much justice, they’re both perfect as is.