Word: gildas
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...ridiculing Monterone, a distraught father who accuses the notorious, skirt-chasing duke of dishonoring his daughter. Monterone responds by cursing Rigoletto, praying that he may know first-hand a father's misery. Of course, the curse comes true, for the duke has already espied Rigoletto's beautiful daughter Gilda from afar. Not knowing who she is, he proceeds to make her his next conquest...
Meanwhile, the duke's courtiers conspire to abduct Gilda and carry her off to the palace. When Rigoletto finally finds his daughter again, seduced and deflowered, he swears revenge and hires a paid assassin, Sparafucile, to murder the duke at a wayside inn. As for the denouement, suffice it to say that Gilda, despite ample evidence of her lover's inconstancy, dies to save his life...but not before singing a last extended duet with her broken-hearted father...
...most of the soloists are recruited from the New England Conservatory, classical music and choral groups around town, and the Boston Conservatory. Saturday night's cast was superb, particularly tenor Richard Munroe (the duke of Mantua, to be played by Thomas Oesterling next week) and soprano Kaja Kjestine Schuppert (Gilda...
Schuppert's voice initially seemed to have a shade too much vibrato and a touch of shrillness in the upper notes. Fortunately, as the show went on, she exhibited an excellent technique and impressive range which were put to especially effective use in Gilda's virtuosic solo...
Sweeney's medical prognosis is good--her lymph nodes were cancer free, and doctors tell her there is little chance the cancer will recur. But her ordeal is eerily reminiscent of that of another former SNL cast member: Gilda Radner, who died of ovarian cancer in 1989. The two had the same dressing room at SNL and the same doctor at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and oddly, just before Sweeney got her cancer diagnosis, she had agreed to appear at a benefit for the Gilda Radner Foundation to fight ovarian cancer. "I feel guilty talking about her, because it seems...