Word: aida
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Emma Merrill '56, newly elected technical manager, is assisting Salaman with the set revision. The station recently elected Aida Romanoff '54 president, Sandy Rosman '55, program director. Ruth Jacobs '54, production manager, and Marina Von Newman '56, business manager...
...ready for almost any coloratura role that may come her way. Most of the eight she already knows (e.g., Gilda in Rigoletto; Olympia in Tales of Hoffmann) call for light-skinned singers, but she has no objection to wearing light makeup. "If white singers make up to play Aida or Otello," she says, "why shouldn't Negroes be able to make up for roles like Lucia di Lammermoor...
...Verdi's fieriest scores, some of his most memorable arias, e.g., the soprano's Pace, Pace and the old Caruso-De Luca specialty, Solenne in Quest' Ora (Swear in This Hour). Director Bing, who has already restyled Verdi's Don Carlo, Aida and Rigoletto-and who wants "very much to have in this house a complete Verdi cycle" -settled on Forza for his 1952 opener...
...result, though not dull, is fairly distressing. No opera better lends itself to spectacle than Aida, and thanks to Lemuel Ayers' opulent sets and costumes and a $250,000 outlay in non-Confederate money, My Darlin' Aida is often bright spectacle enough. As for the story, its bloodhound violences have more bang than the opera's rather bloodless grandiosities; but My Darlin' Aida is a mass of strident cliches, puerile dialogue and hack vulgarities. As for the score, though its glories remain, they are dented and tarnished by embarrassing lyrics, new bits of orchestration, and musicomedy...
...undertaking My Darlin' Aida, Librettist Friedman was frankly inspired by the success of Carmen Jones. But there are great differences, not just between him and the much defter Oscar Hammerstein II, but between the parent operas themselves. Carmen has a vivid, earthy, human story; Aida's is unreal and faraway. Carmen, again, has the theater blood of the opera comique; Aida possesses both the stiffness and the elevation of truly grand opera. Where many operas-La Traviata, Tosca, La Boheme-might be at home on Broadway, not only must the story of Aida be revamped; the finer values...