Word: lustrous
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Richard II shows us a rightful but incompetent king. The two Henry IV plays give us an efficient ruler who usurped the throne. Only in Henry V are legitimacy and lustrous leadership combined in one man. Last summer, the American Shakespeare Theater's new artistic director, Peter Coe, chose Henry V to inaugurate his tenure and was lucky enough to enlist the formidable Christropher Plummer for the title role. Coe is kicking off this season with the second play in the sequence, which the AST has not offered for 20 years...
Apart from the lustrous leading players, each major-minor role is played in stellar fashion. Stephen Moore makes of Bertram's boon companion, Parolles, a pompous, endearing rogue and braggart, a mini-Falstaff. The countess's clown (Geoffrey Hutchings) is Lear's fool, in wit though not in pathos. And Robert Eddison, as adviser to the King, is an elegant paradox, a wise Polonius...
...glows with an eerily sweet intelligence and morning energy. Emerson's sentences make a moral flute music-prose as a form of awakening. They move in a dance of sensual abstractions, small miracles of rhetoric. He had no genius for massive literary architecture; he dealt in the lustrous fragments of his essays, in a succession of quiet flashes...
...Alice Ford, Soprano Katia Ricciarelli sang with a lustrous tone that matched her resplendent blond beauty and sparkling stage presence. Hers is a voice that can both beguile with gentle lyricism and blaze with the incandescence of a high-spirited diva. Other noteworthy performances came from American Mezzo Brenda Boozer, who made a lively Meg Page, and Soprano Barbara Hendricks and Tenor Dalmacio Gonzalez, who sang touchingly as the young lovers. British Director Ronald Eyre kept the action crisp; he was correctly content to execute the composer's wishes, rather than impose a fashionably idiosyncratic view...
Nureyev's Don Quixote provides a satisfying evening of dance. The Boston Ballet should feel no qualms about backing a star with so lustrous a reputation; the company acquits itself honorably, and some members are outstanding. As for Nureyev--true, he turns 43 this week; true, he doesn't leap so high as he used to; and true, his performance is not a model of precision. But for arrogant sexiness, for self-confident cockiness, for unmistakable style, for sheer class, he's got it all. Rudolf Nureyev may be an old dog, but the needs no new tricks...