Word: basilio
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This week Nureyev is performing nightly with the Boston Ballet in his own production of Don Quixote. Although watching him is still a thrill, his technical shortcomings are especially conspicuous in the role of Basilio. This romantic lead requires a more blithe, more innocently carefree personality than comes naturally to Rudolf Nureyev the world-wise and world-weary. Nureyev's cockiness and arrogance overpower principal dancer Marie-Christine Mouis (who alternates the role of Kitri-Dulcinea with Laura Young): in his arms, she seems nervous, skittish, more than a trifle unsure of her suitor's affections...
...beginning is deceptively idyllic. An American writer with the initials A.C. moves into a little, apricot colored house overlooking the town of San Basilio. She intends to research a study of the near medieval lives of contemporary southern Italian women, but she soon gets far more than she asks for. Her friend Marina, a schoolteacher, turns out to have been the secret mistress of the previous occupant of the apricot house: Marco Santoro, a gifted teacher and that anomaly in San Basilio, "a hopeful...
...lovers awaken each other from the trance that is life in San Basilio, but the town hates a survivor. To be happy is to earn a curse. When Marina crumbles at the prospect of malice and decides to abort their child, Marco kills himself-apparently. Even suicide is subtle in San Basilio. The sight of lives strangled by dead traditions offends Miss Cornelisen to the bottom of her reforming American soul. "Change is possible," she insists. "The future cannot be postponed forever." But what gives her theme the tension of tragedy is that she also loves her characteis- God help...
...find the way in. The final punishment for San Basilic is not that its people are cut off from the rest of the world but that they are cut off from themselves. "Sympathy cannot penetrate real desperation," Miss Cornelisen writes. That can stand as her last word for San Basilio-and for the honorable failure of a first-rate artist...
...Barber, written by Rossini in 1816, comes after Figaro chronologically, but the action of the play is a prelude to that of the Mozart opera. In his role as Don Basilio, Gill will be called on to sing one of the most memorable parts of the opera, the "calumny" aria...