Word: elixir
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Founder and captain of his high school math team--which won two California statewide championships--Smith is graduating with honors in chemistry and physics. He also produced this year's Lowell House opera, "The Elixir of Love," has played the piano since he was four, has rung the Lowell House bells for the past three years, has worked summers as a park ranger in the West and plans to go to divinity school when he returns from Sikkim...
More than half the population over age ten gulps down coffee at an average rate of two cups a day. To coffee lovers the black brew is an elixir that soothes frazzled nerves, gives the mind a lift at exam time, spells drop-in hospitality to the housewife. Yet in recent years coffee has been tentatively tied to various afflictions, including diabetes, heart attack, and cancer of the colon, urinary tract and stomach. Last week Harvard University researchers announced a statistical link between coffee and cancer of the pancreas. The pancreas produces enzymes vital to digestion and the hormone insulin...
...flutter of duets and trios and sprightly choral spectacles, the rejected Nemorino turns for help to the traveling doctor Dulcamara. This quintessential quack provides him with the magical "elixir of love" (A bottle of Bordeaux) which will transfix Adina's attentions. Adina and Belcore prepare for a gala wedding, and Nemorino sells himself into the army to buy the elixir, and his rich uncle dies, and the elixir works or maybe it doesn't, and brightly garbed townspeople dance and sing about wine and romance...
Though few escape awkward moments on stage, all the characters rise to moments of lyrical grandeur. Peter Cody, a visitor to the Harvard stage, begins his Nemorino with a strong tenor voice and a characterization even more bumbling than the plot requires, but the magical elixir appears to ease his stiffness. His second-act aria to Adina surmounts the frilly animation of the production, creating, somehow, a wrenching summer-night sweetness between the cardboard storefronts...
...chorus's carefree inventiveness typifies what one expects, and happily gleans, from an evening of House light opera, its blaze of color reflecting the elixir's goodnatured powers of enchantment. The beholder's eye rejoices in a visual revue with snatches of symphonic pretension, a waltz of cowboy hats and ruffled decolletage and flame-red dime-store feather boas, all swirling away gaily beneath the Lowell House chandcliers...