Shelley Cooper makes us believe she is Maria Callas in La Divina, her one-woman show about the legendary opera singer. That’s no small feat, as Callas was a prodigious force on stage, not only as a singer but an actress. Fortunately, Cooper excels in both those departments, having appeared in such previous musical-theatre roles as South Pacific, The Barber of Seville, and Sweeney Todd, to name but a few. She has also worked as a director/choreographer. Above all, she has the looks, presence, and power to dare impersonate Callas, the singer whose personal life was every bit as controversial and stormy as her professional life.
Cooper brings La Divina to the 2021 Hollywood Fringe Festival after having presented it at the 2021 Orlando Fringe Festival, where she won the Critics’ Choice Award for Best Individual Performance in a Drama.
Cooper, working on a near-bare stage, clad in a black dress and pearls, portrays Callas near the end of her life, giving an interview to the unseen TV journalist, Mike Wallace. The latter, a provocateur, kept trying to get her to talk about her marriage to the Greek billionaire Aristotle Onassis, who dumped her for Jackie Kennedy. Callas rises above Wallace’s prurience by reminding him that she was above all a serious artist, dedicated to her craft.
Proud of the fact that she was a prima donna -- literally, a first singer -- she proves it by sometimes bursting into song. The excerpts are from her operatic repertoire, arias from Puccini, Verdi, Bizet, and Gluck. Cooper delivers them with stunning urgency and beauty, turning La Divina into something of a mini-recital.
The personal facts touched on by Cooper include Callas’ difficult childhood in Nazi-occupied Athens, her equally difficult relationship with her overbearing mother, and her marriage as a teenager to her Italian manager. Then Onassis came into her life, charmed her into leaving her husband for him, only to treat her coldly once they were married. A man who hated opera, he forced her to give up her career, something she did for a decade, returning to the stage only after he took up with Jackie Kennedy.
Cooper gives us a Maria Callas at the end of her life (she died in 1987), when she is looking back on it and weighing it up, the good and the bad. Although she acknowledges her mistakes and rues the wasted years with Onassis, she refuses to ask for our pity, declines to badmouth Onassis and/or Kennedy. She stands proud and tall, every bit the prima donna, “the divine one.”
