Word: miscasts
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...gathering of the clans in the second act are wonderfully exciting. In the title role, Sandor Konya conveys a gentle, human Lohengrin, and William Dooley makes a rich-voiced, menacing Telramund. But the female roles-usually easier to fill-are not nearly so satisfying. Rita Gorr is cruelly miscast as Ortrud, and Lucine Amara's voice is not big enough for the crucial role of Elsa. The Wagner devotee will find here a superb rendering of the master's orchestration, but he will inevitably wonder why, with all their resources, Leinsdorf and RCA Victor let a definitive Lohengrin...
This scene is regrettably marred beyond redemption by Stephen Joyce, who is woefully miscast and misdirected as Antony. He has intensity, but of an adolescent sort. Supposedly the best orator in a play full of good orators, this Antony afflicts us with an ugly voice and a diction rife with malformed vowels. And when, during a pause, a citizen says, "Now mark him, he begins again to speak," Joyce has not given the slightest hint of intending to resume. This speech--one of the most famous in all literature--is simply a disaster. When it was concluded at the opening...
...England's most debonair lords. En route to her destiny. Sophia is delayed briefly in a bordello, which has chambers designed for train buffs or Arabian Knights. There she meets Paul Newman, who performs behind a large mustache, possibly to conceal the fact that he is hopelessly miscast as a bomb-toting French anarchist. In her title role, Sophia gleams like a crown jewel plunked down in a series of velvety settings to no particular purpose, though she is droll as a pregnant adventuress who has to decide whether to marry and let her son be born a duke...
...sure whether Stephen Michaels, who plays Strephon, is miscast, or has simply been directed for all the laughs he's worth. Whichever, Strephon does not emerge as the creation of Gilbert and Sullivan. Jennifer Lee Kosh as Phyllis, however, ultimately succeeds although she seems more suited to character roles than heroines...
...amateur casting works in general. We avoid the disruptive inongruities we'd get if we recognized, say, Mastroianni as Christ, or Gassman as John the Baptist. Still, one's preconceptions about these familiar characters persist, and mine labelled miscast the Angel of the Lord, Salome, the old Mary, and Judas...