With friends like Obama...
THere are two lessons here. Sometimes it helps to apprise yourself of the subject matter before a morning at the movies. And secondly, audiences can be surprisingly robust.
Which brings us to a brand new co-production of Mozart and da Ponte’s comic opera Cosi fan tutte, which gets its British premiere at the edinburgh Festival this month.
Unusually, however, refunds have been offered to ticket buyers before the first performance. The stated fear is that the ‘provocative and sexually explicit take on Mozart’s opera’, set in Italian east African colony eritrea, adds ‘volatile, violent racism’ to the original opera’s HILLAry Clinton has become the first female presidential nominee of a major US party.
While there is nothing remarkable about women political leaders in Scotland and the UK, this is a huge step forward for the United States.
Now little girls there can think: ‘One day I could grow up and run for office against a reality Tv star who treats women like a human version of Crufts.’
It was also instructive to see how two Democrat presidents supported her at last week’s convention. Bill Clinton said the first two times he proposed to Hillary, she turned him down. So let’s hear no more about her bad judgment. After all, she finally accepted at edinburgh Castle or the Scott Monument, depending on which Clinton you ask.
President Obama also gave Hillary a powerful endorsement: ‘She was doing everything I was doing, but just like Ginger rogers, it was backward in heels,’ he said.
The effect, however, was slightly spoiled at the end when she came onstage and the two political allies, who had worked together for eight years, endured a hug that was as awkward as when a groom waltzes with his mother-in-law at the wedding. Still, it was a huge step forward from Barack’s last tribute to Hillary, when he was asked whether or not she was really presidential material.
‘She’s not always flashy, and there are better speechmakers, but she knows her stuff,’ he told Face The Nation.
It makes you think that Barack Obama is the very last person you need if you want someone to boost you to his single friend: ‘yeah, she’s OK. I mean she’s got a haircut like Fred Munster and you can’t shut her up – but do you really want to still be living at home with your mum and a bunch of cats?’