Word: corsaro
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Machine. The work is true grand opera. Baroque audiences loved a good show. Handel gave it to them, and in Houston so did Director Frank Corsaro. Armida, a kind of ancestor of the Queen of the Night, arrives in a cloud of darkness and swirling smoke, surrounded by a small zoo of reptiles and other phantasmagoric creatures played by dancers. The staging of the final battle between the Christians and the Saracens is a novel affair that can only be called aero-choreography: dancers and acrobats pirouette, somersault, tumble and flip high above the stage in stylized but effective combat...
...never staged during his lifetime, nor at all until 1972, early on in the current Joplin revival. Last May it was presented by the Houston Grand Opera, with new orchestrations by Composer Gunther Schuller and choreography by Louis Johnson. So successful was the production, directed by Frank Corsaro, that it has been transported intact to Washing ton's Kennedy Center for a three-week run. Later this month it will open on Broadway at the Uris Theatre...
...Corsaro, a veteran director of Broadway and opera, has given Treemonisha a dreamy, timeless feel that softens its awkward edges and enlarges its fable. He and Designer Franco Colavecchia have conceived sets that underline that aura of make-believe. The plantation cabins, for example, are shells that are held up on poles by supers. The rainbow that greets Treemonisha's ascendancy to leadership is an arch of ribbons. Dancers with alligator and bear masks move in and out of the voodoo scene. Louis Johnson's choreography does have a touch of Broadway pizazz. But when those good plantation...
Sexily Luscious. Director Frank Corsaro has staged Die Tote Stadt as a brilliant, psychologically adroit multimedia show. Movie and slide projectors play on the front scrim. Four slide projectors illuminate a scrim in the rear. Corsaro and Cinematographer Ronald Chase spread a series of images that are at times dazzling in their three-dimensional effect-grotesque faces, Gothic walls and towers, eerie grottoes, flowers, woodlands. The production opens, for example, on the exterior of Paul's house. Then, through the masonry, the portrait of Marie begins to shine. The lights come up behind the scrim in Paul...
...standard of the composer's later works, Impresario is a trifle. Its characters are types-Mr. Angel, the elderly financier, Mme. Goldentrill, the aging diva. Yet how boldly the types are cast, and how fresh the music. It was a good show, even though Director Frank Corsaro placed the action in the Edwardian era in a wasted effort to provide contrast with the Salieri. Sopranos Karan Armstrong (Goldentrill) and Ruth Welting (Miss Silverpeal) filled the theater with fine singing and fetching looks...