Word: handels
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...Handel's Julius Caesar...
...this musty, dusty atmosphere of doom that director Peter Sellars '80 is trying to drive away with his production of Handel's Julius Caesar. Updated, polished, and stocked chock full of yucks, in Sellar's hands this baroque warhorse becomes a close cousin of a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. Or two or three or four operettas. This production is four hours long. Granted, Handel wrote music as God meant music to be, but the theory that "Excess is best" holds only for sex and money...
Those with personalities just this side of the grave will cough, teeter, then collapse at the indignities Sellars has wrought upon the story. But all of Handel's operas are dramatic dogs anyway--there is nothing a director could do to the script to make the spectacle any less unbelievable. The juxtaposition of Handel's mostly sunny score and modern theatrical hijinks is potentially as worthy as any other approach...
What I did get was some of the finer music to be heard in Boston in awhile. Conductor Craig Smith prefers a richer, warmer Handel than my original-instrument tuned ears are accustomed to, but the quality was impeccable. Had Sellars and Smith done a little judicious paring on the score, my ears would have left totally elated instead of mildly exhausted...
Several years ago iconoclastic Director Peter Sellars updated and transposed the locale of Handel's Orlando when he set it at the Kennedy Space Center and on Mars. This approach, however, amounts to apologizing for the libretto. A better way is to insist on fidelity to both spirit and source. The trick is to get the audience to suspend its disbelief and to care as passionately about the amours of Sappho, Princess Iphise and the god Mercury...