Word: dictions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Perhaps one reason for the dramatic effectiveness of the production is its use of an English translation of the libretto. The clear diction of the cast ensures that no word is lost, even in the larger ensembles. The translation itself lacks any particular spice, and at times seems to support the argument that there really just is more room for redundancy in languages we don't understand than in English...
Although, in truth, the comparison between Magic and Rankin is not Air-Jordan-tight (Rankin's diction is much better), both are multi-talented big men who stress the team "we" before the individual...
...earlier fans: "I see we have our quorum of leather queens here tonight." Bette the Broadway star, fronting campy production numbers and performing the stark Rose's Turn from her forthcoming CBS revival of Gypsy. Bette the burlesque comic, delivering her Sophie Tucker jokes with a wonderfully perky diction that bleaches out the blue. Finally, Bette the nonpareil balladeer; she has now sung The Rose 4,186 times, but it and her other standards still bloom. Age has made Midler's interpretations subtler, more mature, and her supple pipes rarely get frazzed by the punishing workout she puts them through...
...lust but still defiantly erect. The actors' posture is important here. As Anna's negligent father, Rip Torn walks with the cramped stride of a man who stays upright by lying to himself -- even as Torn remains true to the text by speaking in the obscure diction of the Muppets' Swedish Chef. And Liam Neeson, wonderfully direct as Anna's would-be redeemer of a beau, lurches from anger to perplexity. He is like a backward child with an oversize soul...
This wish for privacy, for restraint, is most moving when the poems that express it are themselves restrained--either metrically, as above, or to two or three tones of voice or registers of diction, or, simply, by being short. As Helen Vendler has noted, the situations and contexts in an Ashbery poem relate not to one another but to the poem's (emotional) center. The poems are often strongest when some structural constraint adds to their centripetal force...