Word: librettos
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...wish the world were a different place. I’d like to go on vacation, go and romp and play—just, do that. But I can’t, because I’m busy, preening my CV or illustrating my libretto. And it’s all for you, Fitz. Give me something to work with here, something substantial—none of this “well-rounded” hogwash. Something as knowable and measurable as the $20 bill taped to the inside of this envelope...
...playing on the steps of Memorial Church. Sanders Theater was only half full when Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3, Opus 72a started playing. Opus 72 is known for the many changes it has undergone over time. The piece was originally composed as an opera to a libretto and has been rewritten by its composer four times. It is in the form of Leonore Overture No. 3 that this operatic composition has received its greatest success. The HRO’s performance of the short overture, despite handling the crescendos in an almost too-professional manner, still sounded...
...they - Burton, screenwriter John Logan, the whole cast and crew - they've done it. This adaptation of the Hugh Wheeler libretto (from Christopher Bond's play) is both faithful and liberating. The story, of a bitter man in 19th century London who has lost his wife and child and determines to carve out his revenge, has never seemed so human or so bleak. It's no longer just a Guignol songfest, staring at its creatures, with fascination but not pity, from an Olympian distance above the cage in which they claw at one another. Inside this sarcophagus of a play...
...Broadway work (Spamalot, The Drowsy Chaperone) has been spot-on silly, somehow summoned a perfect reading of the antique text, and piqued in people who'd seen the show before one of those "Eureka!" moments. Now, we got it. We saw the maturity, the emotional wisdom in Goldman's libretto. His story - about two married couples who meet 30 years after the girls, chorines in a Ziegfeld-type revue, met their husbands-to-be - was revealed as a brilliant portrait of loves lost, ideals corrupted, obsessions curdled into desperation. Suburban infidelities truly could be the makings of bourgeois tragedy...
...letter of W. S. Gilbert’s libretto is sometimes confusing (there’s a joke about St. James’ Hall, for example, that was totally lost on me), the spirit comes through loud and clear. That spirit is usually hilarious...