#breeches role

[miz-chase]

Actresses in "Breeches Roles" ~1875 - 1910

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[ludevika]

More artfight refs? More artfight refs.

A literal unicorn (badly masquerading as a street urchin), the unoffical official vampire queen and a actress lady specialized in breeches roles doing phantom thievery exploits at night.

... I like the aesthetics Vampirony is starting to develop.

[winter-wise]

Breeches roles in opera are so important to me. "Let's dress this woman in trousers so that she can play a man" spectacular. Sometimes the breeches role is for some innocent young guy but personally my favourite is when the breeches role is the character of a very horny twink.

[fidelio84]

Some thoughts about trouser roles

In interviews with various opera singers, I have often read sentences like “I’m saying goodbye to the trouser roles because I want to show my feminine side in the future”.

I find it hard to understand this opinion, as I believe that the singer’s masculine clothing and tomboyish look highlight her femininity better than dresses with plunging necklines, corsets, or high heels. Female curves are more noticeable when they are occasionally visible under a male costume that is supposed to hide them.

The same goes for the movements: One would expect a male character to move a certain way. Therefore, the noticeably “softer” movements of the young “man” on stage (such as his gait, running, and the way he embraces someone) are even more striking.

I believe that the femininity accentuated by deliberately feminine movements and clothing is less noticeable than the femininity that occasionally peeks through despite efforts to conceal it with masculine attire and gestures.

The graceful hand movement of a trouser role emphasizes the singer’s femininity more than a low neckline dress ever could.

[muchadoaboutmusicals]

So this may have been posted ages back but you had a thing about Peter Pan plays which I thought was good, but I was wondering a bit about not generally liking women playing peter. I ask b/c I go to an all women's college and we put on a production of starcatcher. Peter was played by a girl and she was fantastic. As in, I had to remind myself a few times that she was actually a girl. So do you think the whole women playing Peter is more an issue of physical appearance or acting?

1. That sounds amazing. You’re going to have to send me some pictures of this all-female “Starcatcher” because you probably know how much I like things like that. 

2. OK. So….I think my main issue is that it’s always, like, a fully adult woman playing pre-teen boy. Like, the story is about youth and boyhood. I don’t know a LOT of grown women who can really get me to suspend my disbelief enough to accept them as young boys. Especially when most shows then turn around and cast actual young boys for the Darlings…

That’s a soccer mom and her 2.5 kids, y’all. And then! They also have kids or teenagers playing the Lost Boys…

I’m just looking at it and thinking “Huh. Look at those five age-appropriate boys who could have played Peter.” Or even, say…those twenty-something newsboy-like young men playing Lost Boys, any of whom easily looks and moves more like a young boy than the Peter…

Look, my home theatre isn’t immune to this either. Look at this poor woman. She’s like 40-something. She has a child in this show playing a pirate. She…she does not look like a little boy. She does not move or stand like a little boy. She can’t, her body doesn’t move like that anymore. She flew into the wall for like a week solid during rehearsals. Why? Why would they do this? They are a college theatre, with a dozen or more readily accessible college-age boys who could do this. Heck, they have college-age girls who could do this. WHY. 

This is what I have a problem with, specifically. I don’t understand it. But I grant you that the younger the woman playing Peter and the closer in age to the Darlings and Lost Boys, the better this becomes. I myself came dangerously close to casting a teenage girl as Peter in middle/high school production “Peter & Wendy”, only deciding against it because she was a better Wendy. When the Peter is still about as young as the rest of the children, I start caring significantly less about the gender of the actor. And I think it’s because it’s less obvious and jarring. These girls can move like an 11-year-old boy. They are the same size as the “kids”.

Then it’s, like, a whole other thing if you actually want to say “Peter is a girl in this version. This is the story of a girl who would not grow up. Embrace it.”

Then it’s just a girl Peter Pan. And I love it and have no problems. Or you’re saying we have a Peter Pan story with all girls…

And then I’m extra excited. 

So, I guess what I’m saying is…don’t try to convince me a grown woman is a small boy if she is surrounded by actual small boys? It works against them from both an physical appearance perspective AND an acting perspective. Like when you have young people playing elderly. Even with make-up, they don’t quite LOOK right and they don’t really move like that age because their joints and muscles don’t work that way. They’re too fast or too slow, they hold their weight wrong, etc. etc. 

So, obviously, in some cases a girl/woman playing Peter Pan CAN be done well. They have the physicality and voice work and a youthful appearance to pull it off. And they have a supporting cast and a show concept that makes it work for them. In that case, I champion the decision. 

[miz-chase]

Actresses in "Breeches Roles" in suits ~ 1875 - 1910

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[fidelio84]

A quote about Cherubino ...

„On the other hand, the fact that [Cherubino] is sung by a female voice forces us to pay attention to the ways in which that voice, and the sentiments it expresses, differs from all the male voices in the opera. So what does Cherubino talk about? He talks about love. He is the only male in the opera who has the slightest interest in that emotion. [In his aria ‘Non so più’] he shows […] a romantic and poetic conception of what he is after that is quite unlike the ideas of all the other males in the opera, who all see sex as a means of asserting domination over a key piece of property in the male world.“ (cf. Nussbaum 2013: 38–39)

Bibliography: Nussbaum, Martha C. (2013): Political emotions, Harvard University Press.

[fidelio84]

“Voi che sapete” – One of my favorite versions

Among my favorite versions of this aria are those of the singer Edith Mathis. Unfortunately, there is no studio recording of her singing Cherubino in Italian, but there are three live recordings, of which the one from 1963 (conductor: K. Böhm), reissued by the PONTO label in 2022, is my favorite. There is a recording on video of another performance from 1966. The staging is staid and boring, which I think is a shame, because E. Mathis was a great actress whose talents are underused in this production, in my opinion. The costumes are presumably meant to look “historical” but are anything but historically accurate. The orchestra plays on modern instruments that cannot reproduce Mozart’s music correctly. But the singing is great. An agile, youthful voice with bright tones in the higher registers (but never shrill or strained), but also with volume in the lower registers without sounding old and heavy. Softly flowing, lyrical singing and clean articulation without pathos.