Zachary Stains
More naked opera. In the 2006 staging of Vivaldi's opera Ercole su'l Termodonte at the Spoleto Festival in Italy, the hero of the opera, Hercules, played by tenor Zachary Stains, is naked onstage for much of the opera.
The opera itself is pretty silly. The plot is based on the ninth labor of Hercules, except in this version Hercules has to get the sword of the queen of the Amazons, not her girdle. Hercules is accompanied by three other men, and at the end, two of the men marry two of the Amazon queen's daughters and everyone is happy. (In the original myth, Hercules is alone and the queen gets killed.)
When the opera was written in 1723, the Pope had forbidden women on the stage, so the female roles were played by castrati, men who had been castrated before puberty so they retained their soprano voices but had the lung power of grown men. Apparently the Pope was just fine with the practice of castrating boys, but having women onstage was shocking and unthinkable.
Zachary Stains' costume consists of just a lion skin, which is how Hercules was portrayed in ancient art, attached to a cloak, and the costume doesn't cover up much, as you can see here.
But just in case you didn't get a good enough view, at one point, Stains takes off the cloak and lion skin and sings an aria buck naked. One wonders whether Stains was hired for this opera for his voice (which is very good) or for his body.
Here's that scene. If the music sounds like a florid exercise in singing as many notes as possible, well, that was Vivaldi's style. Personally, I love classical music, but I don't particularly love Vivaldi. But with the eye candy in this performance, you don't need to love the music.
5 comments:
I love that! Not a fan of opera, but I find nudity on stage to be refreshing.
you can download (and enjoy!) the full opera at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8I-A_u4NAp4
you can read about the child porn case at
https://nypost.com/2018/06/20/opera-singer-who-went-nude-for-role-gets-probation-for-child-porn/
update about his whereabouts (2016) at
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/arts/music/russell-oberlin-renowned-countertenor-is-dead-at-88.html
another note:
the Greek "soldiers" in the opera wore very short skirts, I have not been able to confirm if they were "commando" or not under it.
another nude opera:
in the British version of Phillip Glass' Akhnaten, Anthony Roth Costanzo appears completely nude with a full boy wax, see
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/feb/12/singing-philip-glass-akhnaten-anthony-roth-costanzo-naked-pharoah
for a first person account
while (almost) naked male dancers are a little bit more common (even Roberto Bolle was briefly naked at one) opera singers are not.
Let's hope this will improve
@Larry: I was never into Opera, but these posts have piqued my interest.
@Anonymous: A million thx for the links. I started watching the Youtube link. It's a bit of work trying to read all the closed captioning ...
... but actually I wasn't doing too much reading.
It's sad to read about the child porn issue with Stain. It's amazing that he has such immense talent, and is physically hot as hell. I hope he's pulling his personal life together. He needs to do more nude Operas!
Zachary Stains: what body!!! and dick!!!
How to make to shock more? Nice!!
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