Word: dybbuk
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...Dybbuk (1938), a Polish film, Saturday...
...epic. Who in our time has lived so fully and with such daemonic intensity? There are no candidates. "Painting," he once observed, "is stronger than me; it makes me do what it wants." There is no way to guess on whom, if anyone, Picasso's now homeless dybbuk may next descend...
Even Leonard Bernstein has to rest sometimes. So the man whom Igor Stravinsky once likened to a musical department store announced that he will take a year off from conducting in order to write new theater pieces. Among his main projects: a musical version of the dybbuk, the Jewish legend of a wandering evil spirit that seeks to possess its victims. Bernstein's vacation won't begin until September 1973, by which time he will need it even more. His imminent schedule includes stints at the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony...
Because he wants to go professional, Darwall designs an enormous number of shows--and has worked on Gilbert and Sullivan and Loeb shows simultaneously twice (Patience and The Dybbuk; Ruddigore and She Stoops to Conquer...
Enter Laurence Senelick as Reb Azrielke. For the remaining two acts he commands the stage, judging the rightness of the dybbuk's claims, then bringing the powers of the underworld against him. Senelick is by turns pitious and imperious, awful in the robes of his rabbinical office, then faint in the arms of a friend. His lines are difficult, full of the persistent legalisms that could have reduced tragedy to laughable pontification. Set against the virtuosity of his performance is the disembodied voice of the dybbuk, sounding all the more despairing and alone in its electronic chill. There, away from...