Word: librettist
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...about the 55th time, Librettist Alan Jay Lerner settled back to watch On a Clear Day You Can See Forever at Manhattan's Mark Hellinger Theater. This time he brought along a fair lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, and afterward, as the cast applauded her backstage, Jackie smiled: "Oh, Alan, I haven't seen anything I loved that much in years." Lerner hadn't gotten that big a rave in the seven weeks since the show opened, so he took the lady over to El Morocco and bought her a glass of champagne...
...more copyright problems, another misfire. Deciding that "you can't write opera unless it's you," he hit on Strindberg's play Miss Julie, whose morbid Freudian thickets "fitted me; I am fascinated with death." The Scandinavian setting, too, suited his Norwegian heritage, but he and Librettist Kenward Elmslie figured that the drama might have more impact if transformed into a love tragedy involving a Deep South heiress and her Negro servant. Timely and all that. Off to New Orleans they went to soak up some local color, only to belatedly discover that it "just wouldn...
...mock Sennett musical called Drat! The Cat! Then some of those cool New York cats-the critics-spoiled the party. They decided that, while Elliott was charming enough as a simple-souled cop who falls in love with a cat burglaress, they weren't so charmed by Librettist Ira Levin's pratfalling plot. As Mrs. Gould commiserated with her husband, the producers closed the play after...
...this opera, commissioned by the Ford Foundation, Librettist Kenward Elmslie has taken dramatic liberty with both fact and legend. Lizzie (Soprano Brenda Lewis), actually the younger Borden daughter, has become the older one, obsessed by fears of approaching spinsterhood, painfully exposed in a scene in which she tries on her sister's wedding dress. A domineering, miserly father and a self-centered, vindictive stepmother create a stifling, explosive atmosphere in which Lizzie's chilling actions become more plausible...
...story is told in dance, music, and drama; the two major characters are each represented by a dancer, a singer, and an actor. I think I see what James T. Anderson, the composer and librettist, had in mind: to tell a story successfully through the medium of one art form is an accomplishment limited by the possibilities of that form. Why not, then, tell the story in many forms, deepen the experience, and ultimately create a far richer understanding for the audience? It makes sense in theory, but not in this particular application...