Word: librettos
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...Beverly Sills was the honored guest at the Peking Opera. She found the music entrancing, the setting beguiling-and the opera incomprehensible. So did many Chinese in the audience. Therein lay the seeds of a revolution: the libretto was flashed on a screen at the side of the stage for the benefit of those in the audience who might not grasp every nuance of archaic Mandarin. Sills resolved to take a cue from what she witnessed. The idea was reinforced when the Canadian Opera in Toronto pioneered the use of English captions in its productions of Richard Strauss...
...Opera became the first major company in the U.S. to subtitle a live opera performance. For the experiment, General Director Sills chose Jules Massenet's Cendrillon, a rarely performed, exquisitely frothy turn-of-the-century version of the Cinderella tale. The English subtitles, selectively translated from the French libretto, were projected on a dark, 6-ft. by 47-ft. screen unobtrusively suspended below the theater's proscenium arch. Members of the audience could either ignore the running titles or read along as the action unfolded onstage...
...writer fond of doing the unexpected--previous works include A Clockwork Orange, a translation of Oedipus Rex and a sonata--Burgess strives for effect by interweaving the life of Freud, a sci-fi apocalypse, and Trotsky's visit to New York. Styles range from a libretto to a TV-play, at times in utter parody of themselves...
...third story, a Broadway-style libretto for a musical about Trotsky's visit to New York City in 1917, carries on the same theme. The cast dances its utopian way--"We do the dance now." /"A dance yet"/"Enough of this bourgeois nonsense"/--through the streets of the city in a Pythonesque recreation of Silk Stockings. Politics are essentially ignored, as Comrade Trotsky discovers the meaning of life though--what else--love...
...another channel, Leon Trotsky visits New York City in 1917 to rouse the American proletariat. Burgess tells this story in the form of a libretto for a Broadway musical, complete with lyrics. Trotsky falls for Olga, a hardheaded party worker, while his wife cavorts with a wealthy socialist. Four hearts beat as one until the revolutionary's son is reported missing. Trotsky's life is changed forever when he is reunited with the boy, and the songs turn as sentimental as the story. At the finale, the hero chants, "Family's first,/ Love is completeness,/ Power...