Word: aria
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Most of Sellar's staging ideas are as clever and witty as one would expect from this incorrigibly bratty director. Perhaps the best scene is a long aria in which Caesar announces how he will kick much Egyptian butt in an upcoming battle while his bodyguard gets chased around the stage by Egyptian commandos...
...many of the scenes are marred, however, by lackadaisical execution by the spent actors. And a few of the scenes are downright inexplicable. During one interminable aria, Sesto wrestles with a rubber snake, ties himself up with a garden hose, then connects the end of the hose to his arm. The program declares that Sesto is singing that, "The offended serpent never rests until its venom is spilled into the blood of the offender." Rubber hose, rubber snake, poison...nope, it's too subtle, I just...
...finally, in absentia, his citizenship. After years of agitating for permission to work in the West, Lyubimov had cruelly been granted his wish. Since then he has staged plays and operas throughout Europe and in Israel, ranging from a Rigoletto in Florence, in which the heroine sang an aria while wafting through the air on a swing, to an expressionistic version of Pushkin's Little Tragedies in both Stockholm and Bologna. But his career, however thriving, involves painful artistic detachment, akin to a nuclear scientist's working through a glove...
...grounding his work with a few simple ironies, he can humanize his basic screen character, that of the dutiful loner, and separate it from upstarts like "Sly" Stallone and Chuck Norris. The sergeant's swearing, for example, is well beyond the grunting demands of realism; it is an aria of obscenities and more a commentary on macho posturing than an assertion of it. Same thing with the women's magazines he reads. See, he hopes to re-up with his ex-wife (Marsha Mason, full of fire and ire) and thinks maybe a little secondhand psychobabble ("Did we mutually nurture...
...bother to film Verdi's Otello if you are going to omit its most famous aria, the haunting Willow Song, thus reducing Desdemona to a walk-on? Director Franco Zeffirelli never quite answers that question. The flamboyant Italian's 1983 cinematic version of La Traviata widened the opera's scope with tender reminiscences only implied in the libretto. In Otello, however, flashbacks to the Moor's slave childhood are maudlin, and Zeffirelli's camera, jumping edgily from storm to massed choruses to brawls and bedrooms, tires the mind. As Otello, Tenor Placido Domingo is in robust voice, and Bass Justino...