Word: librettist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sweep and dash of pure old-fashioned romance. He found it in French Novelist Gaston Leroux's 1910 thriller Le Fantome de l'Opera, long a standby for stage and screen adaptations (notably Lon Chaney's 1925 silent horror film). The version devised by Lloyd Webber and Librettist Richard Stilgoe dispensed with much of the novel's narrative superstructure to focus on two characters: the gruesomely disfigured genius who haunts the Paris Opera and the young Swedish soprano, Christine Daae, who is the object of his unholy affections...
...which just about no other art form can allow." For Woods -- a sort of Fractured Fairy Tales in which Cinderella, Rapunzel, Jack of Beanstalk fame and other beloved characters all meet in the same forest at the same time and blunder into one another's stories -- Sondheim and Director-Librettist James Lapine started sketching ideas soon after the premiere of their first collaboration, Sunday in the Park. Through three workshop productions, a regional tryout at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego and five weeks of Broadway previews, they kept making fundamental changes almost daily, even in the basic plot...
When Composer-Lyricist Stephen Sondheim and Director-Librettist James Lapine completed their Pulitzer-prizewinning musical Sunday in the Park with George in 1984, they began exploring two new ideas: to create from scratch a classic myth or fairy tale for the stage and to bring together Lucy, Ralph Kramden and other memorable sitcom characters in a single overlapping story for a TV special. Eventually the two plans sort of fused. Instead of the sitcom figures, the authors decided to jumble larkingly together the characters and archetypes popularized by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. The strikingly original yet completely...
...result of Mackintosh's invitation to Sondheim and Librettist James Goldman to "have a wee think" about revamping the show, the pair has come up with four new songs and a completely new book. According to a program note by the creators, "scarcely a line of dialogue remains from the original." The central story of two couples, old friends, who married the wrong partners used to end in nervous breakdowns for some of them; it now closes with self- understanding and at least hints of reconciliation. What felt in 1971 like a put-down of old-fashioned musicals for their...
...composer who employs himself as a librettist has a fool for a collaborator. Goya's scan-deep profundity is revealed in such apercus as "I have to paint to live. But I only live to paint." Never once, though, does Goya show its hero in the throes of creation. There is little sense of the penetrating psychological insight of his official portraits, and important events like his rise to court painter are only alluded to, or take place offstage. The horrors of the Napoleonic invasion, reflected in Goya masterpieces like the stark, brutal The Third of May, 1808, are suggested...