Word: laderman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Last week the New York City Opera embraced the trend with not one but three premieres on successive nights: Lukas Foss's Griffelkin, Hugo Weisgall's Esther and, most provocatively, Ezra Laderman's Marilyn (yes, that Marilyn). All three were designed by Jerome Sirlin (who did Broadway's Kiss of the Spider Woman), a dazzling visual stylist whose fluid use of video projections instead of built sets annihilates space and time and gives his productions an exhilarating sense of visual freedom...
...Laderman's Marilyn, on the other hand, is for grownups. The libretto by Norman Rosten, based on his 1973 memoir Marilyn: An Untold Story, concentrates on Norma Jean's notorious love life, tracing her downward spiral to a drug- induced death in 1962. Soprano Kathryn Gamberoni gives a breakthrough performance as Monroe: after this, companies should be lining up to offer her femmes fatales from Bellini's Norma to Berg's Lulu. The opera, however, is as much of a mess as Marilyn was. Rosten's lines (Marilyn to her half-sister: "How's your little dog Lollie...