Word: joans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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There were fleeting moments on a higher plane. Operatic Soprano Anna Moffo, aglitter in gold, thrilled with a selection from La Traviata. Folk Singer Joan Baez, musically effective if a bit maudlin, dedicated All My Trials and its plea, "Hush, little baby, don't you cry," to Jacqueline Kennedy. The show crashed to a close as a huge red heart emblazoned U.S.A. LOVES L.B.J. drifted from the ceiling and the crowd chorused an Allan Sherman parody to the tune Once in Love with Amy. Sample lyric...
...PURITANI (3 LPs; London) is the last and loveliest of Bellini's operas, a story about the Roundheads and the Stuarts in the days of Cromwell incongruously drenched in Italian melody and sunlit harmony. Only singers skilled in bel canto, such as Joan Sutherland and Maria Callas, dare try it. In the new recording, Sutherland is the demented Elvira, and when she sings Vien, diletto in a deluge of perfectly matched and sparkling runs and trills, she embellishes even the embellishments. Maria Callas (on Angel's earlier version of I Puritani) has no such quicksilver in her voice...
...play is more than ever a star vehicle, since only star fire will kindle the dramatic deadwood. As Joan, Ellen Geer puts her teeth into the part and not much else. There have been earthy peasant Joans (Siobhan McKenna) and eternal-child Joans (Julie Harris). At a guess, Director Douglas Campbell or Actress Geer conceived of the saint as tomboy. This tomboy Joan wants to conquer the English at Orleans for the sheer roughhousing fun of it. Thus, when she is captured, imprisoned and questioned by her inquisitors, it is merely as if her playmates were being taken away from...
...rest of the cast cannot fill the vacuum left by this Joan, but George Grizzard achieves a telling comic portrait of the Dauphin. He is petulant, epicene; he oozes suppressed venom. Wandering erratically about the stage like an uncooped hen, he scratches up laugh after laugh...
...Their liberal, independent-minded heroes and heroines are beginning to sound like stubborn, self-willed children who refuse to grow up to reality. At the same time, ironically, their reactionary clerics and villainous statesmen are beginning to sound like paragons of good sense. The doctrine Shaw preaches in Saint Joan is every woman her own woman, every man his own king and commoner, his own lawgiver and lawbreaker, his own god and creature. The very adoption of these ideas has exposed their limitations as panaceas for a better and happier world...