Word: carmens
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Weak and in agony, Carmen Martinez, 72, pleaded for the right to a peaceful death. Hospitalized in Hialeah, Fla., for almost two months, she had a fatal form of hemolytic anemia, a blood disease. The treatment that was keeping her alive involved surgical incisions into her withered veins so that almost continual blood transfusions could be forced in. "Please don't torture me any more," she begged her doctor, Rolando Lopez. Many doctors routinely, if quietly, withhold life-preserving treatment when they determine that its only effect will be to prolong the agony of dying. But Dr. Lopez...
...This Carmen is scarcely voluptuous. Rather, she is a kind of molting puma, long in claw and tooth, snarling at a world that is not to her liking. Wanton she may be, but she gets no joy out of it; her eye is out for the main chance, for social advancement rather than sexual gratification. Her quarrel with the overseer of the cigarette factory ends in no mere slap; she tears the poor creature's bodice and carves a bloody cross on her back. Her seduction of Don José is more challenge than submission, and when he ultimately...
Such divergence from the stereotyped passion often associated with Bizet's opera is characteristic of Choreographer John Cranko and his Stuttgart Ballet. Last week the company presented its new Carmen as part of a six-week stand in New York that will be followed by a road tour lasting until August. Cranko had sat through scores of Carmen operas, and he says "I always thought they were all wrong. If you see in Carmen nothing but a nymphomaniac who meets a tenor, seduces him, gets tired of him, then meets a bullfighter-it's a bore." Instead...
Dissonant Morass. Not everybody liked it-and with reason. As one expects of Cranko, the ballet had dramatic cohesiveness. Settings, cleverly suggestive of Goya, managed to be both beautiful and forbidding at the same time. In Marcia Haydée (Carmen), Richard Cragun (the Toreador) and Egon Madsen (Don José), Cranko could field a trio whose ability to project feeling into narrative ballet can hardly be matched. What went wrong was the music. Scorning Bizet, Cranko got German Composer Wolfgang Fortner to produce a dreadful, cacophonous "Bizet collage" incapable of sustaining any nuance of emotion. Worse, the score picked...
...London's Royal Ballet School and later as a disconsolate member of the Marquis de Cuevas Ballet -weighed 138 pounds and was known as "the fat Brazilian." Today, at 100 pounds, she has an angular, spindly body that, in repose, sometimes suggests a Mary Poppins more than a Carmen or a Kate. But in motion she ranks among the world's top ballerinas. She is also, certainly, one of the world's most effective dramatic actresses, a master of body language who sometimes seems capable of reaching an audience's heart-or funnybone-simply by running...