Word: despots
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...first it appeared that Jean-Claude might be a more enlightened despot. He promised an end to repression and an economic revolution. But he actually made few real improvements. True, political opponents were no longer executed as often as they had been under Papa Doc, but the son imitated the father in using the army and the secret police, the dreaded Tonton Macoute (a term for bogeyman in Haiti's Creole dialect) to brutalize the population...
...flashback, beginning just before his first encounter with Lady Guinevere (Laurie Meyers). Korn suddenly transforms into a frisky young king, pleasantly nervous on the eve of his wedding. No matter which incarnation of Arthur he is creating, shy playful fellow or idealistic ruler or tortured husband, Korn plays multifaceted despot with warmth, subtlety and unerring dramatic consistency...
...very bad man, a reactionary cleric, a towel-headed mullah ("towel-head" for short), a "cruel despot," a new shah...
Logging in on the side of the first interpretation is Newsweek, book reviewer Gene Lyons, who wrote this March that the Iranian Revolution of 1978-9 only succeeded, after all, in replacing one kind of Oriental despot with another...
...Puccini's Chinese ice princess that could serve as an object lesson in how the role should be sung. Bringing the full weight of her massive voice to bear on the torturous part, Marton demolished its fearsome technical difficulties while touchingly developing the heroine from a frigid despot into a tender, vulnerable woman. This week at the Met she takes on another of opera's superwomen, Leonore in Beethoven's Fidelia...