Word: bara
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...serpents are gilded with Theda Bara eye makeup and cheap-glam feather boas, but their style is belly dance rather than hippity-hop Charleston. The set, too, is twenties and thirties: the glitter of aluminum foil stars and moons is like the old movie palaces with their ugly statues, fancy organs, and ceilings domed in twinkling lights to look like the midnight sky. The effect is hokey but not distracting--it's just instant dreamland...
...other colorful Offenbach works. But its choreographic steps and gestures are trite, even humdrum at points, and devoid of the kind of grand line that grand ballet at its best demands. (Ah, those outstretched arms signaling the courtesan's entrance-as in a silent film starring Theda Bara...
With her bright red lips, flashing fire-engine fingernails and dramatically mascaraed eyes, the woman of '71 looks like Marilyn Monroe of the '50s, Rita Hayworth of the '40s, Marlene Dietrich of the '30s or even Theda Bara of the '20s. Anybody, that is, but the so-called natural-looking woman of the '60s. The cosmetics makers and the fashion magazines have passed the word: the natural, no-makeup look is a bore. Flashy cosmetic colors are back...
...price in lack of performances. Yerma needs a soprano who can act like Maria Callas and sing like Leontyne Price. In Santa Fe it had Mirna Lacambra, a young Spanish soprano with a red-velvet voice but an acting style that seemed to have been derived from old Theda Bara movies. As a result Yerma, who should have seemed tormented and tragic, often appeared merely a terrible...
...measure of a masterpiece is the amount of abuse it can take. The hit tunes from dozens of operas have been ragged, jived, jazzed, boogied, swung and popped-and most of them have emerged little the worse. Carmen, especially, has survived countless transmutations. Geraldine Farrar, Theda Bara and Rita Hayworth all vamped their way through screen versions; Bea Lillie mauled it at the Met. Maya Plisetskaya danced it to an orchestration including 47 percussion instruments. Oscar Hammerstein's Carmen Jones gave Bizet's gypsy girl a surname and set her to work packing parachutes in the Deep South...