Word: comic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...music makes the evenings a worthwhile proposition. In spite of dreadful limitations, Teresa Marrin, the music director, has managed to come up with a compelling reading of Mozart's score. Her tempi are brisk throughout (occasionally creating problems for some of the singers), and betray a wager on the comic rather than the mystical. The playing is controlled, and some roughness in the brass is more than forgivable given the splendid delivery of the all-important flute part...
Tito is Mozart's second and last opera seria, and shows a master grappling with a heavily codified form and using it to his compositional advantage. Although the form had traditionally excluded ensemble singing, Mozart's greatest successes had been with the extensive ensembles in his great comic operas. Accordingly, he came up with a compromise that went beyond even his ensemble writing for these operas: the finale to the first act, which combines an on-stage ensemble and an antiphonal chorus...
Because he is their father's favorite son, ominous circumstances (the attempted fratricide by his brothers) surround Joseph; his brothers, still driven by jealousy, end up selling him as a slave to a rich Egyptian. A further mixture of tragi-comic events culminate in Joseph's condemnation to a jail cell. From there, the story spirals into an exciting spin and eventually Joseph finds himself in the Pharaoh's service...
...most impressive aspect of this play, however, is not the music, but the production. Executive producer Lori N. Durr and director Scott Arsenault provide the play with the dramatic energy and fervor that complement it musical prowess. Little things like giving the play a contemporary feel to enhance its comic impact by using devices like a Where's Joseph instead of Where's Waldo book. The dramatic impact of the final scene relies on its seemingly effortless creation of a golden chariot. It substitutes people for the animals and parts of the chariot, glitter paper for the reins...
...LOOKING BACKWARDS, it seems almost tragic to Hershey, or perhaps comic, that he really has nothing worth reporting," says the entry. Fifty years after graduating from Harvard College, Omer Fenimore Hershey, a retired lawyer living in Florida, reflected on his life and told the class secretary there was well, not much of interest...