Word: madama
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...diplomat. Jeremy Irons tries manfully, and John Lone womanfully, to give real life to the characters, but the close-ups defeat them. So do some unlikely plot points: the defendant and his accuser are put alone to undress and wrestle in a police wagon; the diplomat daubs himself as Madama Butterfly before a rapt audience -- of French convicts! Cronenberg is unlikely to find other spectators as gullible as they...
...conventionally happy ending can come of this Madama Butterfly for the '90s. Still, renunciation has its own rewards. By the time of their parting, Sachiko has assumed a Western assertiveness, and neither she nor her marriage will ever be the same. As for Iyer, the detached observer has finally succumbed to love -- in typically Zen manner: "By now it was so much a part of my life that I had not even seen it until it was gone...
Soprano Mirella Freni, 56, will not sing Madama Butterfly onstage. The part is so heavily emotional that she feels it could upset the vocal balance she has spent a lifetime achieving. Luciano Pavarotti has just won acclaim for his first Otello, and most musical experts think he was right to wait until age 55 to try the heroic role. The list of parts that tenor Alfredo Kraus, 63, will not touch reads almost like a chart of opera's greatest hits, including Cavaradossi in Tosca and Rodolfo in La Boheme. Kraus sticks strictly to lighter parts that do not strain...
...London in October 1985, lyricist Alain Boublil and composer Claude-Michel Schonberg asked their producer, Cameron Mackintosh, if they now had an assured career in the theater. When he said yes, the two French creators told the impresario they had a new project: they wanted to update the Madama Butterfly story. This time their inspiration was not a 1,000-page Victor Hugo novel but a single news photograph of a Vietnamese mother and daughter parting at an airport. The mother had raised her child with one goal: to locate the girl's father, an American soldier who had returned...
...trouble began when British producer Cameron Mackintosh announced that Jonathan Pryce would reprise his starring role in the Broadway edition of Miss Saigon, the London blockbuster musical that sets the Madama Butterfly story in the Vietnam War. Pryce had won an Olivier Award as the French-Vietnamese pimp who helps effect a poignant reunion between an American soldier and the Vietnamese girl he left behind...