Dolores Delargo Towers - Museum of Camp

Friday, 21 April 2023

The leading lady of Limpopo

The annual Proms Season has been announced!

An amazing itinerary (as ever) - everything from Rachmaninov to Rufus Wainright to Radiohead, Mozart to Mahler to Lata Mangheshkar, Bach to Berlioz to Dee Dee Bridgewater, and much much more besides, over 71 concerts from 14th July to 9th September, and apart from the Royal Albert Hall, in venues up and down the country. Wow.

Read what's on

And people knock the BBC licence fee, which pays for it all (mostly refunded by ticket sales, of course)!

By way of a celebration, here's a remarkably talented lady, indeed. Performing herself at Prom #28, South Africa's finest Miss Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha (for it is she) is not yet 30 years old - yet has a set of pipes on her that would make many a seasoned diva envious!

Here she is, celebrating another of London's grandest music venues the Royal Opera House, at the time it reopened for live performances after the pandemic:

Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha - Dich, teure Halle [Wagner - Tannhäuser]

Simply too, too divine.

Saturday, 15 April 2023

Microtonally nuanced

Another sad loss - that marvellously fruity veteran actor Murray Melvin.

From the Familiar Unknown blog:

A truly individual actor, Murray Melvin's acid-camp performances are always mesmerising in their precision, microtonally nuanced in emotion. His path took him from West End office clerk to sweeping the stage at the East London's Theatre Royal Stratford East, where Joan Littlewood nurtured a company of remarkable natural actors plucked from all walks of society. She chose him to play the implicitly gay Geoffrey in the ground-breaking play A Taste Of Honey, a role he reprised in the film version in 1961, winning himself a Best Actor award at Cannes.

Having carved his singular niche as a striking-looking and slightly-menacing-in-an-effete-way character actor, he went on to appear in myriad classic films including Sparrows Can't Sing, Alfie, The Boy Friend, The Devils, Lisztomania and Barry Lyndon, and on telly in The Avengers, The Onedin Line, Jonathan Creek and Torchwood.

We always reckoned he was the reincarnation of Pharaoh Akhenaten:

By way of a tribute, here's a full 40-minute reminiscence, with the great man in conversation with eminent reviewer Michael Bilington:

Murray Melvin in conversation with Michael Billington

RIP, Murray Melvin (10th August 1932 – 14th April 2023)

Thursday, 13 April 2023

Fashion is not frivolous

"Fashion is not frivolous. It is a part of being alive today."
"The fashionable woman wears clothes. The clothes don't wear her."
"Snobbery has gone out of fashion, and in our shops you will find duchesses jostling with typists to buy the same dress."
“I love vulgarity, good taste is death, vulgarity is life.”

"A woman is as young as her knees."

RIP, the Swinging Dame Mary Quant OBE, FCSD, RDI (11th February 1934 - 13th April 2023)