Word: libretto
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...might think you could never tire of W.S. Gilbert's witty libretto or Arthur Sullivan's spirited score, but The Harvard Gilbert and Sullivan Players (HGSP) prove that boredom is indeed possible in Constantine Arvanitakis' mediocre production of Trial By Jury and The Sorcerer. After close to three hours of staccato notes, operatic singing and overacting the audience is more inclined to climb the walls than to applaud...
...razed/ In nineteen forty-eight/ When the Israelis passed/ Over our street" are the first words of the opera, sung by a chorus of exiled Palestinians; later the Israelis get equal time. Goodman combines flights of fancy with earthy images and expressions -- this must be the first operatic libretto in history to employ the word asshole and the Yiddish meshugaas. Yet, as in Marilyn Klinghoffer's homey pieta, Goodman can soar. "I have only a short time," the widow sings after learning of her husband's death. "What can part us while I live? I grieve as a pregnant woman...
...Mario Cuomo, but he is too liberal to pass the D.L.C. entrance exam, and since his inspiring "City on the Hill" speech at the 1984 convention, he has been reluctant to sing before a national audience. D.L.C. stalwarts like Bentsen, Al Gore and Robb have tin ears. Nunn's libretto -- defense and national-security policy -- seems increasingly irrelevant for a world rushing toward peace. The current season's high-decibel speaker, House majority leader Richard Gephardt, seems too opportunistic as he screeches out a hard-rock message of economic nationalism and a Free Enterprise Corps while bashing Bush for timidity...
...Chicago has asked him to undertake Frank Norris' McTeague. Bolcom recalls that in his student days he improvised at the piano during a silent-movie showing of Greed, Erich von Stroheim's classic film version of McTeague. "I was bowled over. I thought, 'Jesus, this is an opera.' " The libretto is almost done, and the composer already has a fat folder full of musical sketches. "It is about sex and violence, passions and emotions," Bolcom says gleefully. And he notes, just as gleefully, that the story is set in the ragtime...
ROMANCE IN HARD TIMES. The libretto of this off-Broadway musical about the Depression is odd, but the score is one of the most memorable in years...