Word: libretto
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...organ music. Operas performed in this country tend to be done in languages which neither the singers nor the audience understand, mainly to spare everyone the agony of an evening of insipid plot and badly worded dialogue. This is especially true of the comic opera, where a libretto is mainly a skeleton to drape music around, and the plot is filled with improbabilities acted out by impossible characters...
...second rate Italian of the original into third rate English, and tried to present it as a sort of Gilbert and Sullivan with real music. The producers of the Leverett House Figaro seem to think that there is some theatrical merit to da Ponti's book; if the libretto indeed has any function, it is as a bad example. Even Neil Simon would blush at the plot, the story of a newlywed bridegroom trying to keep his lecherous employer from exercising droit de seigneur...
...activity, including the fatalistic rhetoric, is by and large a familiar libretto at any Menotti premiere. For he is the owner of one of the most monumental writer's blocks in operatic history. In 1951, for example, he was so desperate to get out of a commissioned job from NBC television that he offered to give back his $5,000 fee. "Nothing doing," said NBC, and Menotti eventually came up with that bright and sturdy Christmas evergreen, Amahl and the Night Visitors. All told, Menotti has been cornered by circumstances enough times to produce a larger number of effective...
...that follows the pleasant, well-traveled road of early 20th century Italian opera. His story is a simplistic, easy-to-follow tale of blacks v. whites. In a contemporary "white state" in Africa, a young black scientist, Toime Ukamba (Baritone Eugene Holmes), makes a discovery-happily undisclosed in the libretto-that will not only be beneficial to all mankind but will make the country that possesses it the most powerful in the world. The rulers of the state are something less than thrilled that a black has become their "most important man," and Toime soon finds himself in bitter...
...Follies helped create, to get at its concerns. As in his Company of last year, producer-director Prince has thrown out the time-honored musical convention of using songs to advance a simple-minded script in favor of letting the music add new levels of meaning to a sophisticated libretto (by James Goldman). In this way, the central plot idea of Follies becomes merely one more ingredient of the show rather than its raison d'etre...