As a human, Maria Callas was a diva. As a musician, she was a divinity. In the early Seventies she came down from Olympus to share her wisdom with us mortals and gave a series of open classes at the Julliard in New York. These seminars inspired Terrence McNally to create a full-scale portrait of opera’s greatest star.
The play opens as a biting slice of character comedy as Callas inflicts her brand of ‘coaching’ (i.e., character assassination) on three wannabe soloists. It’s amazing. She’s back. The legend walks the earth again in all her gorgeous and contradictory coloration. She’s exacting, brilliant, charming, shy, arrogant, needy, fragile, evasive, fiery, frigid, miserable, exuberant. She’s magnificently paranoid and heroically lonely. She’s aphoristic too. ‘Rivals?’ she quivers imperiously. ‘How could I have rivals when no one could do what I could?’
Her devotion to her craft is obsessive.
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