Word: lincoln
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There are a few inappropriate giggles at Manhattan's Lincoln Center, but no matter. The important thing is that French Composer Maurice Ghana's jagged, surrealistic chamber opera, Syllabaire pour Phèdre (1967), has found a stage. Together with Henry Purcell's well-known yet seldom performed 17th century opera Dido and Aeneas, Ghana's work last week inaugurated the Metropolitan Opera's Mini-Met-officially known as the Opera at the Forum...
...Mini-Met stage is one that many Girl Scout theater troupes might find modest. Housed beneath the Vivian Beaumont Theater in the Lincoln Center complex, the Forum is a tiny arena theater seating 280. There is no proscenium and no orchestra pit; the musicians, instrumentalists as well as chorus, must squeeze onto a narrow balcony suspended above the stage...
This sort of vicarious heroism repels me. What kind of person would feel no unease as he remembered his village burning to the ground? How many Vietnamese mothers felt no qualms when American bombers killed their sons? If all Vietnamese combined the best qualities of Edith Cavell, Abraham Lincoln and Ho Chi Minh, maybe their revolution would be successful enough to outweigh the individual tragedies of 1.6 million dead, at least for people--if there are any--personally untouched by the war. But however appalling they found the prospect of indefinite misrule by the United States and its Vietnamese collaborators...
Faith. These preposterous doings are ornamented by a series of time displacements and truth warps in which Matthew appears as an American adventurer soldiering in Spain in 1836, and as a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade 100 years later. Repeatedly the author writes a scene that the reader is expected to follow in good faith, only to have Matthew, a chronic and helpless liar, admit that nothing of the sort ever happened. Then the incident is retold in terms of richer and yet more baroque untruth...
...screenplay preserve the paradoxes, but only at the necessary cost of neglecting motives and character, and building a buffer of mystery between individuals. In a little Italian village, the son of a local hero of the opposition to Mussolini returns seeking the murderer of his father. Like Lincoln, the hero was shot in a local theater--during a performance of Rigoletto. Like Macbeth, he had been warned by gypsies of his impending death. Like Caesar, he was found to have on his dead body an unopened letter with the same prophecy--previously handed to him by a mysterious...