Word: libretto
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Gypsy, a slapstick but chilling portrait of the ultimate stage mother, faithfully evokes the original Jerome Robbins production, including, alas, the cutesy, numbers-strung-together Arthur Laurents libretto. If Daly cannot quite dislodge from memory the performances of Ethel Merman and Angela Lansbury, particularly not as a singer, she rivals them as a force of nature. Coarse, thoughtless, unscrupulous and fierce, her Mama Rose is nonetheless just likable enough to explain why two daughters and a surrogate husband stick around so long and forgive so much. Among supporting players, only Jonathan Hadary, as Rose's agent and lover, excels...
...libretto depends too heavily on whether the industrialist will turn crooked to save his neck (anyone can see he will) and on a love match between the baron and the ballerina that ends almost before it has begun. Director- choreographer Tommy Tune provides a pretentious last-minutes ballet between characters introduced as love and death. Despite these shortcomings, Grand Hotel is the musical winner of the season, bringing to mind, if not quite matching, the kinetic narratives of Harold Prince, Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett in their heyday. Tune takes a set more cluttered than Threepenny's -- fluted columns...
When Bertolt Brecht created his legendary Mahagonny, that "City of Nets" where every pleasure is for sale, he neglected to specify exactly where it was. It was originally thought to be the Nazi-threatened Berlin of the 1920s, but the libretto that he wrote for Kurt Weill's most ambitious opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930), seems to be set on a wildly imaginary Florida Gold Coast. But to Jonathan Miller, the gifted British director who was commissioned to stage a new Mahagonny at the enterprising, young Los Angeles Music Center Opera, there could...
...line. One day, as he was driving past a Los Angeles record store, he recalled the opera whose title he and his friends so scornfully invoked in college. "I hit on the idea of deconstructing Madama Butterfly, and popped in on impulse. As soon as I looked at the libretto, I knew it would be fine." He finished a draft in six weeks, in Los Angeles and then in France, where he had gone to mark his first wedding anniversary...
Impeded at times by a fairly lame English translation of Da Ponto's libretto by Andrew Porter (I mean, would Susanna really call Figaro a "blockhead" in the eighteenth century?), it is Mozart in the end who gives us the most aural pleasure. Who can resist the remarkable closing scene of The Marriage of Figaro, in which Figaro and Susanna, the Count and Countess Almaviva, Marcellina and Bartolo and all other cast members join together in praise of love and happiness? It's a scene not to be missed, confirming Mozart's brilliance in choral writing and the Lowell House...