Word: goodmans
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...instantly controversial as The Death of ! Klinghoffer. To begin with, the subject matter is politically incendiary: the brutal 1985 murder of a wheelchair-using American Jew by Palestinian terrorists aboard the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro. Further, the opera is the second collaboration by composer John Adams, librettist Alice Goodman, choreographer Mark Morris and director Peter Sellars -- the people behind Nixon in China. That dazzling 1987 opera left a trail of argument in its wake as it made its way across America and Europe. Surely, Klinghoffer would be even more provocative than its predecessor. Wouldn...
...Goodman, the Cambridge-based poet, writes vigorous, stark verse whose impact is almost physical. "My father's house was razed/ In nineteen forty-eight/ When the Israelis passed/ Over our street" are the first words of the opera, sung by a chorus of exiled Palestinians; later the Israelis get equal time. Goodman combines flights of fancy with earthy images and expressions -- this must be the first operatic libretto in history to employ the word asshole and the Yiddish meshugaas. Yet, as in Marilyn Klinghoffer's homey pieta, Goodman can soar. "I have only a short time," the widow sings after...
Some flaws: the comic prologue seems superfluous, sandwiched as it is between the potent Palestinian and Israeli choruses. Singing in English, the Belgian chorus was unintelligible; Goodman's dense text demands supertitles. And one does miss some of Nixon's stirring climaxes. But none of this should impede Klinghoffer's success. Already the opera has been scheduled by its other co-producers -- the opera companies of Lyon; Glyndebourne, England; San Francisco; and Los Angeles -- as well as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it opens in September. This broad international debut will serve to confirm Adams, Goodman, Morris and Sellars...
Recent research has shown how easy it is for youngsters to stray unwittingly from the truth. Psychologists Karen Saywitz of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and Gail Goodman of the State University of New York at Buffalo interviewed 72 girls, ages 5 and 7, about routine medical procedures they had received. Half were given full examinations, including anal and vaginal checks, and the rest were given just general physicals. When the first group was asked a broad question about what had happened, only eight mentioned the vaginal examinations, and when the children were shown anatomically correct dolls, six pointed...
...other words, neither the actors nor Mazursky, whose gift for portraying middle-class muddles (Down and Out in Beverly Hills) is unquestioned, achieves the kind of confident relationship with their material that Goodman and Ward enjoy. Goodman is terrific in his big comic set pieces (notably a decorum- shattering rendition of Good Golly Miss Molly at a royal ball). But even in those he avoids the temptation to broad farce. He and Ward trust themselves to go for something sweeter and more wistful, the tone of the fabulist, and they sustain it with near perfect pitch...