Word: bront
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Douglas gnashes his teeth - as well as the arch dialogue -and looks less like the male Candida that Shaw intended than like a Sportin' Life in tights. Actor Lancaster, as the local parson, glooms away Shaw's most romantic scenes as if he were lost on a Brontë moor. In a climactic scene of comic derring-do, ex-Acrobat Lancaster makes heroic hash of a colonial court house and all the Redcoats in it. Otherwise he is as stiff and starchy as the clerical collar he eventually gives...
...Almost No Brontë." The commission (around $4,500), which spurred Floyd to write a "music drama" out of Emily Brontë's "eminently operatic" novel, came from Director John Crosby of the Santa Fe Opera, a year-old enterprise that runs an open-air theater in the "cultural capital of the Southwest." Floyd read the novel four times and came to a highly debatable conclusion: "I realized it's very badly written; I could use almost no Brontë dialogue. There's no immediacy to it; I had to do a creative job." The job, libretto...
...Regina Sarfaty's portrayal of Nelly, the maid. The 36-ft.-wide stage often seemed too small to contain the action, and in his effort to achieve "immediacy," Floyd produced a libretto so cliché-ridden that it dissipated the briny sense of evil that hung over Novelist Brontë's book. But the sweeping, intricate score pulsed with moments of moving lyricism: Edgar's proposal to Cathy ("Make me whole again"), Cathy's "dream" aria in which she confesses her love of Heathcliff. Audience reaction was tepid; "I liked the movie better," said one mink...
Imaginary Angria. As Mrs. Gaskell surveyed the ruin of the Brontës-Charlotte, Emily and Anne destroyed by consumption, their brother Branwell wrecked by opium and liquor-she could hardly resist making their father the villain of her story. In her version, Parson Brontë emerged as a man of intellectual vanity and eccentricity, who would fire his pistol in the air when annoyed with his family, who once sawed up all the chairs in his wife's bedroom while the poor woman lay in bed in one of her confinements. But to Biographer Lane, the real villains...
Living in isolation on the edge of the moors, never seeing other children, seldom winning a glance of warmth from their father, the little Brontës soon created their own dream world. At 13, Charlotte had written 22 little books of stories about the imaginary land of Angria, where heroes were amoral, sardonic and sadistic; Emily worked at the Gondal chronicles on the wars of Royalists and Republicans in a mysterious kingdom of the North. Later, when Charlotte was a teacher, she found nothing more thrilling than a letter from brother Branwell reporting "news" of one of their...