Word: guignol
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There is much to enjoy. New and unusual works? In addition to La Rondine, the company has revived Léo Delibes' fragile song of the subcontinent, Lakmé, and mounted an operatic staging of Stephen Sondheim's Grand Guignol Broadway masterpiece, Sweeney Todd; next month it presents Philip Glass's new opera Akhnaten. Splendid singing? Clarion-voiced Tenor Jerry Hadley shone as Tom Rakewell in Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, and the company's impressive roster of young sopranos this season includes Kaaren Erickson, Elizabeth Hynes and Elizabeth Knighton...
...hard to look so damnably dashing and avoid being considered a lady-killer. In truth, the Italian actor has lately been playing against type, most notably as an aged and mellowed Casanova in La Nuit de Varennes. And in The General of the Dead Army, a burlesque, Grand Guignol black comedy, which opened recently in Paris, Mastroianni plays the flamboyant General Ariosto, who does not so much get the woman as argue with her over possession of the remains of her late husband. "In most of my roles," he protests, "I am more often the victim than the conqueror...
...theater and opera on stages from Britain's National Theater to the Opera Theater of St. Louis. Among his six productions in the past year alone are a Rigoletto for the English National Opera, conceived as a Mafia saga, and a Hamlet in London rendered as Grand Guignol farce. He has also made films and TV shows, notably for BBC and PBS, including half a dozen feverish but authentic renditions of Shakespeare...
...Mafia in Naples, grabbing the commissions for themselves and frightening rivals with bloodcurdling threats. Poor Domenichino, the Bolognese master who had been invited to decorate the chapel of St. Gennaro in Naples' cathedral, rushed back to Rome in a state of collapse after hearing from this cabal. Grand Guignol abounded, especially in details like the amputated hand in the foreground of Massimo Stanzione's Massacre of the Innocents, which seems ready to scuttle away, like a pink crab...
...macabre opera was not the stuff theater-party hits are made on: a musical about a London barber who cuts his customers' throats, a stage set as bleak as Bedlam, a score full of tunes to scream on your way out of the theater. On cable this sprawling Guignol fits with surprising snugness, and Angela Lansbury still schemes and postures through the role of Sweeney's accomplice like a deranged Raggedy Ann. As Sweeney, George Hearn gives a darkly heroic performance that by rights should win him an Emmy nomination next year. Sondheim advised Director Terry Hughes...