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Posted on 03/10/2026 3:07:09 AM PDT by WhiteHatBobby0701
Timothée Chalamet is under fire this week and losing traction in the best actor Oscar race for saying just about the most obvious thing in the world: Nobody cares about ballet or opera in 2026.
Here is the exact quote from the "Dune" and "Marty Supreme" star during a recent CNN town hall: "I don't want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it's like, 'Hey, keep this thing alive, even though like no one cares about this anymore.' All respect to all the ballet and opera people out there."
The backlash was swift and severe. According to the BBC, Canadian mezzo-soprano Deepa Johnny described Chalamet's comments as a "disappointing take" while, American artist Franz Szony wrote, "Two classical art forms that have been around for hundreds of years, both of which take a massive amount of talent and discipline this man will never possess."
But to today’s pretty boy of Hollywood’s point, who the hell are these people?
When I was 10 years old, the greatest ballet dancer in the world was Mikhail Baryshnikov. He was as famous as Larry Bird or Doc Gooden, as was the greatest opera singer of the time, Luciano Pavarotti. That is gone today.
Today, almost no American has the slightest idea who the greatest ballet dancer or opera singer alive is, because it's not for them any more. The fine performing arts have become a bubble of progressive intolerance. They don’t even want us unwashed non-believers involved.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
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You attend a pop culture church today, instead of a choir singing masterpieces, or opening a hymnal and singing something from 250 years ago, you're relegated to hearing a nightclub where someone in a band sings the latest hits off the radio.
The influence of the record labels and regietheater movement have disturbed all of us.
When marching bands in high schools and pep bands in college have been replaced by dance teams to meet Title IX that gutter to hip-hop, what's next? We teach our boys everything is for women only.
I've been blessed to have seen von State (2011) and Fleming (2017) live.
Heather MacDonald's "The Abduction of Opera" is a must-read regarding this movement.
When I was a kid I saw Mikhail Baryshnikov dance. My mouth was open the whole time. Unbelievable what that man could do.
The precision. The grace. The power. The total command of his art.
As an encore, he came back on stage and danced with a chair. He was basically in his street clothes and danced around and on top of this simple wooden chair.
Flipping it. Playing with it. Simply amazing.
I find it hard to interpret this as a criticism of the particular arts or of the Left. It sounds more like a comment on the public: they prefer other forms of entertainment. Seems like stating a fact.
That’s true.
Our generation had “The Rabbit of Seville” and “What’s Opera, Doc?”. Now THAT was high art, simply unachievable today.
“Oh, Bwunhilda! You’re so Wovewy!”
“Yes, I know it. I can’t helllp it.”
Top level opera and ballet are definitely in demand. Do you know how hard it is to get tickets at Covent Garden?
I was never an opera guy, but I grew up speaking Italian. When I first heard Don Giovanni in my college music class I thought it was hilarious! But that’s because I got the nuances of the dialogue. Now of course I appreciate opera way more.
Someone who doesn’t know Italian and has to rely on a translation is already starting at a massive deficit. I assume the same applies for French or German opera.
But Americans needn’t beat ourselves up over not being the best opera fans. We basically invented our own equivalent that works with our language and our tastes: musical theatre.
Which also got infested by degenerates and sucks now, but that’s beside the point. :)
Ballet and opera were more a part of the woof and warp of culture as was and to some extent still is classical music.
When I attend opera in person or at the cinema live feeds among the sea of white heads there are perhaps 4 or 5 younger people.
These days I find another white head and stream on my 72 inch screen
Ballet is kept alive by the various schools however it is only nutcracker and swan lake there.
And the modern dance horrorshows continue.
Heggie’s “Moby Dick” was pretty good for a modern opera. Prefer Handel any day though.
I used to be big opera fan.
COVID canceled two seasons.
Then the local opera went berserk.
instead of large historic opera productions, they play in some small venues, some kind of modern experiments, super overpriced and not watchable.
Definitely just for few rich connoisseurs!
I do not care anymore!
“ART” can pay for itself... or can’t. If rich people want to pay the entire bill, go for it.
Operas used to be quite profitable.
The Mozarts, Rosinis or Verdes were big stars.
The famous opera singers of past were equivalents of big pop stars of today.
They made their monies and they did not need any government support!
Nowadays, what passes as modern opera is just terrible, so experimental, that nobody can watch it.
So now, they live happily on government support!
I grew up taking ballet lessons, so I had a great appreciation for the skill involved. The unforgettable performance that I watched was Natalia Makarova’s, very shortly before her career ended when she was struck by scenery.
“The reign of Regietheater in Europe is one of the most depressing artistic developments of our time; it suggests a culture that cannot tolerate its own legacy of beauty and nobility. Singers, orchestra members, and conductors know how shameful the most self-indulgent opera productions are, and yet they are powerless to stop them. Buoyed with government subsidies, and maintained by an informal alliance of government-appointed arts bureaucrats and critics, the phenomenon thrives, even when audiences stay away in disgust.”
“The injury that Regietheater does to Mozart, Handel, and other benefactors of humanity is heartbreaking enough. But it also hurts the public, by denying new audiences the unimpeded experience of an art form of unparalleled sublimity. The seventeenth-century Florentines who created the first operas sought to recover the power of Greek tragedy, which united drama and song. Since then, opera has expressed a limitless range of human emotions, set to music of sometimes unbearable exquisiteness. Initially devoted to the exploits of kings and gods, opera by the end of the nineteenth century had conferred on the passions of workers and shopkeepers an equal grandeur, worthy of the majestic resources of the symphony orchestra.”
— Heather MacDonald, “The Abduction of Opera,” City Journal, Summer 2007, https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-abduction-of-opera
I’m fed up with regietheater — but it’s all of us, not a few.
And by the 21st century, the grandeur that Heather MacDonald referenced in opera that had once been reserved for Greek deities and royalty to the shopkeeper and worker, and now legends of sport, approved in the later years by the legendary coach himself.
https://www.nfl.com/news/houston-oilers-legend-bum-phillips-life-as-an-opera-0ap1000000210531
When the legendary coach of the Houston Oilers, Oail Andrew Phillips — everybody knows him as “Bum” — was approached in 2012 with a pitch to make an opera about his life, he responded in trademark fashion, “I can’t sing a lick.”
But Mr. Phillips gave his blessing, and two years later the “Bum Phillips All-American Opera” premiered on March 15 at La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in Manhattan’s East Village. Texas football and opera might seem like an unlikely union, but the world of opera has never been short on brash men of destiny. The outsize, Stetson-wearing Mr. Phillips, who in the late 1970s twice came achingly close to taking Houston to its first Super Bowl, was no less a star-crossed general than Othello. But he was also a jester. His famous wit — homespun homilies affectionately known as “Bum-isms”— made such good copy that even Rigoletto would have had to doff his cap.
— Adam Chandler, “Bum Phillips Inspires an Opera,” Texas Monthly, March 30, 2014, https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/bum-phillips-inspires-an-opera/
Phillips died before the opera debuted, and his son (2015 DEN) and grandson (2021 LAR) have won Super Bowl titles.
Maybe it’s my part-Japanese blood and how death is the solution after failure, but I refer to Magda Sorel’s tragedy in The Consul after failure. After taking voice from 2002-09, which was all classical, Opera became an influence that when I attended a performance of Gian Carlo Menotti’s “The Consul” in November, I had to rethink because I attended it without the emotions I had with my teacher in 2003 of the same opera when I was a “sportsman” vocal student.
I observed new insights into The Consul from my longtime affiliation with South Carolina Citizens for Life and the Charlie Gard case. In the opening, John Sorel is brutally beaten by the Stasi (East German secret police, Menotti never says the nation but I have assumed the Iron Curtain). It leads to a push where the Sorels want to leave the brutal nation. The stage is surrounded by barbed wire of a prison, making the Sorel home in a prison state. During Magda’s first trips to the consulate, she has her mother and the child. Both die at the end of the first half, said in the opera from hunger, but having studied the police state of the era the opera was written in 1951, I could see the Stasi wanted the Sorels dead.
I saw Charlie Gard’s case. The secret police hated the Sorels, so they engineered the child’s death as punishment for John opposing them. It could be the baby Sorel was sick and needed treatments in a nation without socialised medicine and had research to save the child’s life, which the socialised nation did not have (and is the core of the controversy over the government shutdown, the pro-abortion crowd wants to seize all means of health care to create the same problem in England) and the government would not allow him to leave.
I saw the current fight to advance socialised medicine, but then I saw how socialised medicine killed both John’s mother and son because the Stasi who hated John Sorel killed his mother and his son. I also saw how the Left wants to make opponents political prisoners for not conforming to them.
Seeing Magda’s tragic death in the end (”I Never Meant to Do This”) that I’ve known for years, I had an epiphany of it. If Menotti wrote this, or a director set this during the triumvirate of Ronald Reagan, Lady Margaret Thatcher, and Cardinal Karol Wojtyla (better known in the Holy See as Papa Giovanni Paolo II), in the era of defections over the Iron Curtain, John, his mother, and the Sorel son would have been hidden to avoid the Stasi, and in the end, Magda, while contemplating the end, in the flashbacks, hears a phone call from a friend to pack her bags and join her family to escape on a dangerous drive to Checkpoint Charlie. If it was done closer to the modern fight of the socialised medicine activism, since the triumvirate, they would have escaped at the airport to fly towards a place with medical freedom to give the son and mother life-saving treatments.
The Stasi’s brutal assault on John Sorel at the start had me wondering if the Stasi hated the Sorels that much they wanted the mother and child to die. It was Stasi eugenics, and how the modern Left has pushed to attack political opponents the same way now.
The sad thing about not appreciating opera and classical music is you cannot see influences in The Consul, and how it would have been different it it was written in a different era.
I’ve seen a few too many Menotti, but I’ve also known from it moral stories that came to my attention from it by reading other works.
“Looking at the number of media that appear on television in the past decade, with infomercials for the psychic friends organisations prominent during late-night television, and the popularity of New Age spirituality among Hollywood with ideas such as Harry Potter teaching a generation into the New Age, seeing old friends sing again (one posted me a message that she was emotional as it was her last with the university opera company), I thought about what I had seen in The Medium. Seeing Mme Flora (the medium) away, her daughter Monica and servant Toby are playing your typical children’s dress-up games and upon the return of Mme Flora, they haven’t prepared the home for the upcoming session with the Gobineaus and Mrs. Nolan.”
“The medium is supposed to ‘speak’ to the deceased sixteen-year old daughter, after which Mrs. Nolan, infuriated at what she thinks is her girl but is Monica and Toby running an elaborate light and telephone scheme, tries to meet Monica, but is restrained by the other family in the psychic’s home, the Gobineaus, which then attempt to speak, using the medium, to their deceased daughter, but it is the laughing voice of the medium’s daughter too! The result was the psychic thinks the servant has pulled trucks, and refunds the two parents of the deceased. Still, the deceased’s parents think they truly spoke to their dead children. Thinking the servant, who was in the puppet theatre, was a spirit, she kills the servant.”
“What came to my attention was how gullible people are to ‘crossing over’ with the deceased. The Gobineaus and Mrs. Nolan both believed they spoke to their dead children, when it was Monica and Toby’s games. They had been suckered, and Mme Flora was too, as she thought the servant she hired for the ruse was too a ghost.”
“The Gobineaus, Mrs. Nolan, and Mme Flora all had forsaken God in favour of finding cups to fortune (in Derek Thomas voice — Isaiah 65:11). Two were lied and never believed it, and Mme Flora thought her own servant was a ghost to be killed. Regardless, the lesson I learned was never to trust psychics, and that Bible verse posted at the start of this column should be a warning why we cannot trust media such as those in the Menotti opera. “
“The Left destroys everything it touches. There are no exceptions.” —Dennis Prager
Thanks - I found the article. I hate Regietheater, it's done a lot of damage. I love opera.
All of that is true, but there was something else also true, and that was the equivalent talent from non-classical performers. There was Baryshnikov, but there also was Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, and the Nicholas Brothers; there was Fleming, but there also was Sinatra, Crosby, Deanna Durbin and Judy Garland, even Whitney Houston. There is no audience for high quality popular performance, so it is no surprise that there is no audience for high quality contemporary classical performance.
When modern opera re-finds itself, whether it's Adams' Nixon in China or Cascarino's William Penn or similar works, the audience might return.
I think Jesus Christ, Superstar had the longest running production on Broadway. Or perhaps it was London stage
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