Word: librettist
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...Rise of the Stage Director. All right, if there are no new works, then make old works new through flamboyant reinterpretation. The stage director, once a traffic cop, has become in effect a second librettist. These show doctors have made some startling alterations: Jonathan Miller updated Rigoletto as a '50s Mafia love story; Patrice Chereau set the Ring during the turbulence of the industrial revolution; Jean-Pierre Ponnelle WIDE WORLD played The Flying Dutchman as the phantasmagorical dream of one of its minor characters. Most radical of all is Peter Brook's La Tragédie de Carmen...
...Bernstein felt the need to add a cumbersome sequel is a mystery. Does anyone care what happens to Mr. and Mrs. Calaf after the curtain goes down on Turandof? But Bernstein and Librettist Stephen Wadsworth, 30, a former editor of Opera News, have gone ahead to construct a convoluted second chapter that picks up 30 years later, just after Dinah's death in a suicidal, drunken car crash. There are now ten characters instead of two: the couple's son Junior (Baritone Timothy Nolen) and daughter Dede (Soprano Sheri Greenawald, in an outstanding performance); Dede's bisexual...
...Librettist Colby's campy, hit-or-miss humor works best in a scene describing the heroine's mother, a "chronic shiverer" who goes to her reward wearing enough garments to stock a branch of Marks & Spencer. Other beguiling wackinesses: a song about a man who makes eating vegetables seem a sexual experience, the vocal travails of a hiccuping, stuttering woman who has "bubbles in her bonnet," and the soprano heroine's sudden loss of her "high note," which she regains at the price of addiction-to helium sucked from balloons. In less good taste is a character...
...Question 3, a ringing affirmative. The tiny stage of off-Broadway's Orpheum Theater is apulse with the engaging beat of Alan Menken's pastiche of infant rock 'n' roll. Librettist-Lyricist Howard Ashman has adhered to Griffith's plot with becoming fidelity, while sending it up by adding a funky chorus of observers: three black girl singers in tight skirts and tighter harmonies. In the show Audrey Jr. is Audrey II, and at the outset is a tiny terror: Pac-Man's mean mutant brother. By the show's climax, it envelops...
Ultimately, though, these isolated moments are not enough to make The Confidence Man into a coherent operatic whole. By focusing on China Aster, composer and librettist have made the character of the Confidence Man (Baritone Brent Ellis) into a supporting player. Whenever they include other episodes from the novel-principally a scene in which the Confidence Man bilks a barber out of a shave by appealing to his trust-they needlessly distract attention from the main drama. The story of China Aster is not enough; the full story of the Confidence Man would be too much...