Word: librettist
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SEVEN YEARS AGO, COMPOSER JOHN ADAMS, librettist Alice Goodman and director Peter Sellars rocked the opera world with Nixon in China. A number of provocative operas based on the lives of the still living or recently deceased followed, and now composer Stewart Wallace and librettist Michael Korie continue the trend with Harvey Milk, currently in its maiden run at the Houston Grand Opera. But where Nixon took someone who had become a cartoon devil and made him into a man, Harvey Milk takes a fairly ordinary man and makes him into a cartoon saint...
...Royal Academy of Music and at King's College, London, with the early-music specialist and harpsichordist Thurston Dart -- concluded that an even better way to affect the fortunes of contemporary music was to write it himself. In 1976 he composed incidental music for a play by Italian librettist Carlo Goldoni at Britain's National Theatre. He quickly found his own Minimalist style in In Re Don Giovanni (1976), and when Greenaway came calling for the first of their 10 films together, One to One Hundred, Nyman found his true pitch...
...comes the composer-librettist team of Conrad Susa and Philip Littell, who have seized upon Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's 18th century epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses as a fitting subject for an opera. It is an inspired choice: in the machinating Marquise de Merteuil and the voluptuary Vicomte de Valmont the composer has two soulless soul mates whose knowledge of the ways of love make The Art of War look like a kindergarten training manual. What Susa and Littell have created in The Dangerous Liaisons, now getting its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera, is nothing short...
...intermission, felt strained and wearisome. Many theatergoers fidgeted or tittered in the wrong places. (There aren't many right places to laugh in Passion, which makes no use of Sondheim's greatest gift -- a talent for writing intricate comic lyrics that fit the characters.) Sensing disaster, Sondheim and director-librettist James Lapine revamped the plot, recast a major role, picked up the pace and added three songs. The show is vastly improved, but huge problems remain. The obsessed woman, stirringly acted and sung by Donna Murphy, is still difficult to like or admire. The man whom she chases spends most...
...pretty, gay disco pickup in the '70s. This sort of inventive time bending, accompanied by a catchall range of song styles to span the century, tryst by tryst, is what makes off- Broadway's Hello Again the one interesting musical of this scratchy season and its creator, composer-librettist-lyricist Michael John LaChiusa, the big breakthrough talent...