Word: bjornson
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...love, the winning entry is hardly alone (Austria: "Land of mountains, land on streams, land of fields, land of cathedrals"; Canada: "True patriot love in all thy sons command"). Admittedly countries like Norway and India do better than most with the same elements, but they had Nobel laureates (Bjornstjerne Bjornson and Rabindranath Tagore respectively) writing their lyrics. And if some nations have tended to whip up enthusiasm with a ribald reference or two (the now decertified second verse of the German national anthem can read like a gleeful celebration of sex and drunkenness), others rely on bombs bursting...
...production design by Maria Bjornson gives added nuance to the music and the acting. The set transports us to another world. We sail to the Phantom's lair with Christine and feel the ominous pressures of the darkness seeping out of the Phantom. The New Year's Eve masquerade in Act Two, is reminiscent of Poe's "Masque of the Red Death." The Phantom, clad in an angry, bloody red, exacts a shaken silence from the revelers. Like the plague in Poe's tale, the Phantom lurks at every twist and turn...
...composer, director Trevor Nunn and designer Maria Bjornson have tinkered ! in various ways since London, but the main change is in the acting: the people have been made less brittle and more likable. That is in keeping with the cunning naivete of the score. The musical highlights are Love Changes Everything, a ditty as simple and optimistic as a nursery rhyme; Seeing Is Believing, a surge of passion as relentless as teenage infatuation; and a melody almost Viennese in its air of casual resignation, introduced to the lyric "Life goes on, love goes free." Aspects of Love...
...Lloyd Webber's main collaborator on Song and Dance, and to Charles Hart, whose words were the weakest part of Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera. Major contributions were surely made by the composer and by director Trevor Nunn, and the storytelling is also enhanced by Maria Bjornson's dreamlike designs. They shift fluidly from a naturalistic mansion courtyard to a mountain range at sunset conveyed by just a jagged line of reddish purple across a backdrop of black. The performers all act as ably as they sing, notably Michael Ball as the doomed boyish hero who ages into...
...rise and descend, mysteriously unquenched. The lagoon seems to be at or above the level of his hideaway, yet his chambers remain unflooded. Allow oneself a moment's skepticism and the story turns to piffle. But audiences give themselves over to the fantasy concocted by Prince and Designer Maria Bjornson, letting logic evanesce as long as the sights and sounds are glorious. Which they are: bolts of lightning, carpets of fog and flashes of fire compete with the Phantom's midair descent in a chariot of gilded cherubs and his final disappearance while sitting on a solid-looking throne...