Cinderella & Company

By Jesse Birnbaum

This chatty smorgasbord is nominally about Cecilia Bartoli, but the greater part is a hilarious collection of anecdotes, gossip and shrewd observations concerning that unique branch of humanity, the opera singer. Tenors are uncommonly stupid; divas, when they are not scarfing down pasta, are outrageously unreliable. The imperious troublemaker Kathleen Battle, feeling chilly in a limo in Los Angeles, is said to have telephoned her manager in New York City and ordered him to call her driver to ask him to turn down the air conditioning. A nervous Deborah Voigt, waiting backstage for her entrance, absentmindedly ate a prop chicken. Opera buffs will munch happily too on these nuggets.

--By Jesse Birnbaum