Word: libretto
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Enfant et Les Sortileges is a fine expression of the spirit of France in the Twenties. Ravel wrote the score, Collette wrote the libretto, and the sum total is a blithe, flighty, brilliant piece of whimsy, one of Ravel's best. In the Lowell House version, young Anthony McLean does an outstanding job as the child. His voice is suited to the part, and his movements were extremely well done. He handled himself beautifully on stage, in a manner many adult actors might emulate. Jane Struss, who played three roles, was outstanding as she always is. Chalyce Brown, Roger Freeland...
...involved--Peter Stone on book, Jule Styne on Music. Bob Merrill on lyrics, sets by Jo Mielziner, direction and choreography by Gower Champion--appear to have approached the assignment with the kind of enthusiasm that should be reserved only for musicalizations of Night of the Living Dead. Lyrically, the libretto must have been written with a rhyming dictionary in one hand and a Funk and Wagnalls in the other. Musically, the score repeats trite A-B-A patterns with a kind of excess that would be recognized even on Sesame Strret. And the sets are the most resolutely ugly things...
Joplin's libretto has a big subject (how the Negro can improve himself) but an oversimplified solution (education). Its language is embarrassingly laden with darky dialect ("Aunt Dinah has blowed de horn,/And we'll go home to stay until dawn"). There are enough voodoo heavies, cavorting bears and right-thinking preachers to tax any producer's ingenuity...
...Director August Everding and Designer Giinther Schneider-Siemssen, are no exception. Their new Tristan und Isolde, which opened at the Met last week, undoubtedly will provoke arguments for as long as the production runs. To some, it may be a bold realization of the poetry in Wagner's libretto. To others, it will seem more like the further adventures of Mary Poppins, German style...
...term became fashionable. He hired such experienced directors as Frank Corsaro and Tito Capobianco, and gave then free dramatic rein. In those hands even old familiars like Gounod's Faust became provocative productions. In 1968, for instance, Corsaro transformed the simple good-conquers-evil parable of that libretto into a chilling Gothic horror tale of clashing wills between God and the devil. A year later, Capobianco launched Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele a a space-age sonet lumière production in which the devil seemed about to vanquish the music of the spheres until he was whistled down...