Word: labyrinth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...cripple. Though Menotti's Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951), like Maria Golovin (1958), was written primarily for television, the composer carefully followed all the conventions of stage presentation, and both works have been sung in theaters. But Menotti has finally gone all the way. His latest opera, Labyrinth, commissioned like the others by NBC and shown for the first time this week, would be impossible on the stage. It is an out-and-out TV show. Says Menotti: "I thought I might as well do something not tied to the stage. I fought it in one way, because...
Menotti's surrender has been almost too complete. Labyrinth is full of video trickery: there is a gravity-free tea party aboard a rocket, which is halted by the untimely arrival of a meteor; there is an ancient railroad car used as a swimming pool, which, as its water gurgles down a drain to the accompaniment of some electronic movie music, becomes a high-and-dry day coach; and there is a dear old lady who puffs into a cloud of dust as the hero sits down...
Chess & Counterspies. Labyrinth takes place in a murky sort of mahogany Marienbad. Endless corridors and countless doors make the plight of a bridegroom who has lost his key and forgotten his room number on his wedding night seem hopeless indeed. As he and his bride flounder around with understandable impatience, a series of personages appear, each bearing-according to Menotti-a strong allegorical identity. An old man in a wheelchair, who represents The Past, lures the groom into a cobwebby conservatory filled with jungle plants to play a possibly symbolic game of chess. Another door leads him into a drab...
...Opera Company (NBC. 2-3 p.m.). The world premiere of Gian Carlo Menotti's surrealist opera Labyrinth...
...perfect example of the kind of playwright Broadway will still not touch, to its considerable loss. His The Blacks, now well over the 700 mark in performances, is probably the most satisfying work of art ever produced on the color question, an unsentimental depth probe of a labyrinth of hate-guilt feelings, in which blacks and whites literally mask but cannot hide their attitudes toward each other and themselves...