Word: lyric
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Sacks, who teaches English 184, "Fundamentals of Lyric Poetry and English Cpw: Poetry Workshop," has written two collections of poems Promised Lands and Natal Command...
When the curtain went up on the Boston Lyric Opera's "L'Elisir d'Amore," everyone was amazed. The lighting evoked Bellini's "The Feast of the Gods," or the video to "Losing My Religion." Aggressively rustic patchwork dresses and apple baskets, along with a frail red wooden ladder, made certain that this Donizetti comedy would not suffer from any absurd modern setting. The simple but handsome picture frame around the luscious stage set was a perfect touch. Anything so beautiful as all this, one thought, promises to be entertaining...
...result sounds a bit like a Broadway show, but one composed by a pop-culture channel surfer on uppers. Jackie is a sweet-toned lyric soprano; Ari, a bass-baritone, is a smarmy lounge lizard (one of his big arias is marked in the score, "Freely sung, a la Dean Martin"). The music they sing jumps joltingly from folk rock to Motown to big-band jazz, all kaleidoscopically orchestrated for a 19-piece pit band with two percussionists. And although the tone is mostly light and lively, an unexpectedly affecting streak of melancholy surfaces whenever Jackie sings of her lost...
...English 70, full of coffee and spinakopita, brooding happily over this morning's Dickinson lyric ("Is my life, too, a loaded gun?"), when an old expos friend, the one with the navel ring and who wrote all his essays about Hunter S. Thompson, rushes past in an Armani suit, barely nodding as he passes out of sight into some building you've never noticed before. Your familiar drab red sidewalks and dreary staircases are suddenly pounded by Bali shoes, crunching your Doc Martens, pointing their way to Wall Street, engaged in a spring ritual called Recruiting...
...other words, Lyric Stage's production of Blithe Spirit fits the mold. Just as Coward himself was perceived in the first half of the century, it deserves both adoration and derision. Blithe Spirit is splendidly witty at some points and horribly tedious in others...