Word: bravura
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KERN: SHOW BOAT (EMI). The landmark American musical just keeps on rollin' along in a bravura operatic version with Frederica von Stade and Teresa Stratas...
Consider the casting of Aida. Mitchell is a fine American singer still some years away from attaining the heft and bravura that her role requires. Italian mezzo Fiorenza Cossotto, as the vengeful princess Amneris, is past her prime at 53 (she made her Met debut in the same part 20 years ago). And the omnipresent Domingo serves up his familiar blend of pathos and bathos without seeming to care where one stops and the other starts. It is a fatal -- but typical -- blend of age and inexperience that even Levine's elegant conducting cannot ameliorate...
...revels in marijuana in The Viper's Drag. Woodard, too little used, nonetheless glows in Keepin' Out of Mischief Now, while McQueen is at her best in Squeeze Me and the bawdy Find Out What They Like. Carter demonstrates why her name is alone above the title in a bravura sweep from the campy love play of Honeysuckle Rose to the patter of the wartime Cash for Your Trash to a contemplative number newly added for her, This Is So Nice...
Needless to say, things grow far, far more complicated than this, and DeLillo develops his intricate plot with cinematic bravura. There are flashes back and forward in time, and jump cuts between the conspirators and Oswald, who is growing up to become exactly the kind of person the CIA renegades had planned to invent: a malcontent and misfit with a known fondness for Castro and guns. Slowly, dimly, Oswald begins to realize that he is being watched, people have designs on his destiny. Someone who knows what is cooking spells it out for him: "You're a quirk of history...
...BUTTERFLY. Playwright David Henry Hwang reimagines the bizarre espionage case of a French diplomat and his Chinese transvestite lover as a bravura Broadway rap on East vs. West and male vs. female...