Word: librettos
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...acerbic dramatization of his first marriage that played in London earlier this year and is to open in New York City in January. On the other hand, he might well love Cats, a smash musical hit on both sides of the Atlantic, which uses as its libretto his Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1936). For while Eliot was horrified by the prospect of invasions of his privacy, he also longed for the popular acclaim that not even his most successful plays achieved. He was always at war with himself, and the disembodied voice of his best poetry...
...Vishnevskaya defends with the ferocity of friendship. She was not old enough in 1936 to understand the humiliation heaped on the composer when Stalin took exception to his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. But she was witness in 1965 to the drastic changes Shostakovich made in the score and libretto when a movie, renamed Katerina Izmailova, was made of his musical drama. Soviet censors lagged behind their American counterparts where sex was concerned. Vishnevskaya's account of the filming of a bedroom scene: "My lover, who was in full uniform, crawled in after me. I put a thick blanket...
...Supertitles have rightly been criticized for occasional inaccuracy, for anticipating the punch lines of jokes and for injecting an element of television into the opera house, but Sills strongly defends them. "Do I want to tell someone who has worked on Wall Street until 5:30 to study the libretto or take a course in German?" she asks. "Do I want people sitting in my audience with a libretto and flashlight...
...Peter Brook circus, the majesty of a Trevor Nunn midnight Mass-Hands has turned Shakespeare's most popular comedy into a dream play with music and dance. Each line of dialogue (not just "Speak low, if you speak love") sounds like a song cue from the loveliest libretto ever written. Each move seems choreographed to the playwright's verbal arias; the actors glide across Designer Ralph Koltai's gleaming Margard floor as if they were skating on a frozen ebony pond. Through the translucent bower at stage rear we can see the sky swirling madly with birds...
Ever since French Novelist Prosper Mérimée locked a lustful Navarrese soldier and a lubricious Spanish gypsy in fatal embrace, Don José and his Carmen have danced their deadly Habanera through ligh art and mass culture. Although burdened with a sanitized libretto, Composer Georges Bizet transformed Mérimée's cautionary tale into a supercharged epic of erotic obsession that has become a fecund source of material for generations of movie directors. Cinematic treatments have run the gamut from Charlie Chaplin's burlesque Carmen (1916) to the soft-porn Carmen, Baby...