Word: madnesses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...forgotten that an opera audience surely wants to believe in the music at least as much as the story on stage. Floyd is ambivalent about his uses of music. He gives Doll a sweet ditty to sing as she makes dolls for two neighbors' children, but in a mad scene she is totally silent. Can one imagine Strauss or Donizetti abdicating their composers' rights at a moment like that...
...What plot it has concerns two noble lovers who are temporarily made unhappy by conflicting allegiances to Cavaliers and Roundheads in 17th century England. The opera unfolds like a torpid, benign Lucia di Lammermoor: it has a hero who prefers politics to love, a heroine who goes mad. By the time all turns out for the best, it is hard to remember what went wrong: three scenes contain no action of any kind...
...hints: "Is Mr. Sophistication singing I Can't Give You Anything But Love? Look on the back wall-is there a sign that says 'Paris'? You worked seven years at the Crazy Horse and you still can't figure this out?" The moment is mad and funny and just as important as the murder that follows...
...were Mad about Mintz, you may well be disappointed by Philip LaZebnik's latest offering. American in Purgatory is basically warmed over Mintz; shorter and more tightly-knit than its predecessor, it features many of the same actors bandying about similar jokes and singing similar songs within the now almost predictable absurdist framework that has become a LaZebnik trademark. Somehow it all seemed a lot fresher the first time around...
...While Mad about Mintz was salvaged by a stunning second act, some of the most effective sequences in American in Purgatory come near the beginning. LaZebnik is at his sharpest in a parody of psychoanalysis, where the analyst (David Reiffel) exults in his patient's lapses of memory and tells him pedantically that his suffering is necessary, since "only through suffering can you achieve pain." In another beautifully controlled sequence, an imaginary monopoly game becomes a metaphor for life; in this game without dice, escape from jail is possible only through strategems appropriated directly from The Wizard...