Word: comic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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From the beginning, the Opportunes demonstrated the comic flair that differentiates them from other campus singing groups. A barrage of jokes about the Gulf War, the plight of the Kurds and President Bush's "New World Order" jolted the audience into full attention...
...absence of a plot, the play's strength naturally lies in its terse, comic and frequently moving dialogue. Vladimir and Estragon engage in an endless exchange of aphorisms and meditations that range from somber and melancholy to grotesque and inane. They are slapstick hobos in bowler hats and rags, lifted from the innocent genre of the cabaret and set down in the bizarre world of Beckett's imagination. They celebrate the play's nothingness and stasis through repeated gestures and expressions of absurdity...
...little Oedipus Max, the future Dadaist, had a dream, an obsessive vision: "I see in front of me a panel crudely painted with large black strokes on a red ground, imitating the grain of mahogany . . . In front of this panel a black and shiny man is making slow, comic and joyously obscene gestures. This strange fellow has the mustache of my father . . . He smiles and takes out of the pocket of his trousers a large pencil made of some soft material . . . breathing loudly, he hastily traces some black lines on the panel of false mahogany. He quickly gives...
Marino provided outstanding comic relief as the doddering Polonius, and Sheila MacDonald shines as the troubled Gertrude. Saddly, Steven Lucado's Claudius never reaches any kind of emotional intensity. In the final scenes he appears bland--the evil man who killed his brother in order to possess his kingdom and his wife never emerges in Lucando's performance...
Some flaws: the comic prologue seems superfluous, sandwiched as it is between the potent Palestinian and Israeli choruses. Singing in English, the Belgian chorus was unintelligible; Goodman's dense text demands supertitles. And one does miss some of Nixon's stirring climaxes. But none of this should impede Klinghoffer's success. Already the opera has been scheduled by its other co-producers -- the opera companies of Lyon; Glyndebourne, England; San Francisco; and Los Angeles -- as well as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it opens in September. This broad international debut will serve to confirm Adams, Goodman, Morris and Sellars...