Word: ariosto
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...hedonistic groundhog day" is how director Justin Way describes Handel's 1735 opera Alcina, and a week from the opening of Way's new production for Opera Australia, Ariosto's epic tale of a sorceress who casts a succession of spellbound lovers into stone is undergoing its own seemingly endless repetitions on the Sydney Opera House stage. It is Act Three in a technical run-through, and as Alcina's enchanted isle crumbles around her, there are the usual technical tweakings of an opera that lives and dies on the strength of its illusion: the elaborate sets seem to have...
...Kiss Me Kate might be subtitled 'The Taming of the Show.' Based on the Broadway musical based on Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, which was based on an Ariosto comedy based on an old folk tale, the picture is pretty far off any kind of base ... The plot, a musical within a musical, with its noisily surreptitious shifts from onstage to off, appears just too heavy and elaborate a vehicle for the camera to prod along. Even so, if other performers had spread the wings of song as grandly as Howard Keel (Petruchio), the picture might have been better...
...with the help of her court poet; she would then pass the ideas on to Perugino, one of her court artists, with instructions not to invent anything of his own. Something of this kind may have happened at Alfonso's court, whose star poet was none other than Ludovico Ariosto, author of the enormously successful epic Orlando Furioso. Dosso did some paintings that were illustrations of episodes from Ariosto, and is known to have designed sets--long since vanished--for Ariosto's plays...
...Pete's sake. And some of the literary allusions are a little bit esoteric for the ordinary five-year-old monster fan. Five-year-olds are made to feel like losers if they don't remember that the Hippogriff was, of course, the animal that Ruggiero rode in Ariosto's epic, "Orlando Furioso...
Those who pick up this allusion to fanciful old tales may move to the head of the class. Lodge sets his swelling cast of characters into frantic motion across what only looks like the contemporary world; in truth, they move through enchanted old paths out of Ariosto, Spenser and the Arthurian legends. As he takes up the pursuit of Angelica, Persse becomes Percival on the trail of the Grail. For Zapp the quest centers on the newly endowed UNESCO chair in literary criticism, a post that pays $100,000 a year, tax free, and carries no duties whatever...