Word: duenna
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...Jean (The Duenna) Karsavina's libretto, the mustachioed gambler challenges champion frog Dan'l Webster's owner Smiley, then feeds Dan'l up on quail shot while the boys are outside laying their bets for the easy money. Before the contest comes off, the gambler strolls off for a mustache-twirling romance-which provides Composer Foss with an opportunity for some witty, satirical mustache-twirling music. Dan'l loses the contest, but the villain's villainies are found out, and he is brought to frontier justice...
...Juan Tenorio, Spain's traditional All Souls' Day show. "I am too much of a Spaniard and a necrophile," he said cheerfully, "to miss this chance-food and tombs on stage together." Startled first-nighters saw the heroine clad as half nun and half Easter lily, her duenna completely faceless, another nun headless and one tavern character with two heads. Among huge fish, crawling monsters and enormous yellow butterflies, danced a coquettish, bell-shaped madonna. Exulted Dali: "I have never done anything so absolutely my own as this...
Last summer, Director Max Leavitt of the Lemonade Opera Company, who in three years had dug up such old and new operas as Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona and Prokofiev's The Duenna (TIME, June 14, 1948), was scratching his head for a surprise for his 1949 season. A friend told him about Haydn's 172-year-old dramma giocoso II Mondo della Luna (The World of the Moon), wherein a charlatan astronomer and some frolicsome servants persuade a fat, foolish father to bless the marriage of his daughter to a poet by taking...
Both sides agreed that the laurels, so far, should go to cheerful, determined Ralph Bunche. Like a solicitous duenna, he herded the delegates in & out of his personal suite, beamed on their cautious handshakes, protected them jealously from the press. He had also personally drafted the agenda of the conference and the armistice preamble, which one Israeli delegate called "a brilliant piece of statesmanship." At week's end, Bunche, still hard at work, was leaving the optimism to his aides. Cried one of them: "I expect to be on my way to Geneva by the middle of next week...
...Duenna might never be performed again in Russia: its plot is hardly in the acceptable groove, especially after the brisk spanking Russia's composers got last winter for "bourgeois, Western-oriented'' ideas and music...