From All Angles

[Dolly Llama]

LOL. Semiramide is pronounced "say me RAH me day". But if you think that's a little bit much for a name, the role was sung by a soprano named Maria de Montserrat Viviana Concepción Caballé i Folch. Say that five times fast! But she's a very sweet lady! And she's considered to be a national treasure of Spain.

I was one of the secret policemen in Tosca once, and she was of course Tosca. At one point I had to cross the stage and duck behind a part of the set where she was waiting for her next entrance. As I crossed, the chain on my two-ton cape broke. When I joined her behind the set she noticed me trying to fix it. So she reached up (she's nearly two feet shorter) and fixed it for me. I said, "Oh, Miss Caballé, what an honor!" She replied in her heavy Castilian, "Oh, don' be theely!!"

But years later in that Production of Semiramide, they put her in an all white dress. In order to give her a waist, they had to make the shoulders and the hemline very wide indeed. Then they had to give her an ENORMOUS white wig to match to balance everything out. And then of course the makeup had to be adjusted. They over-painted her with high eyebrows that stretched across half her forehead, and put on the rest of it with a trowel. One of our bitchiest SF reviewers said that she looked like Divine, referring to the fat drag queen of Pink Flamingo's fame.

But when she heard about the review, she was ecstatic! She said, "Doyou hear?! They say I'ma looka lika divine!!"