Word: misse
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Near the end of her 20-min. mad scene, Miss Havisham cries out, "I am tired!" There is a derisive titter from the audience. They have sympathy for Soprano Rita Shane, who plays Miss Havisham. She has flung her voice valiantly through trills, runs, arpeggios, and sung paragraph upon paragraph of words that dwarf the great mad scene in Lucia di Lammermoor. But the audience is tired too, because this kind of listening, when most of the words are unintelligible, is also hard work...
...Miss Havisham's Fire is the ninth opera by the American composer Dominick Argento, 51, who has at least two major successes, Postcard from Morocco and The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe, to his credit. The new work, which had its premiere last week at the New York City Opera, is in almost every way a disappointment. Argento and his librettist, John Olon-Scrymgeour, say that their work is "after Dickens," not to be compared closely to Great Expectations...
...focus has been shifted from young Pip to the vindictive harridan who teaches him his first lesson in cruelty and deceit. In Miss Havisham's Fire we see her on her calamitous wedding day, deserted by her bridegroom. (The young Miss Havisham is sung by Gianna Rolandi, who has a generous mad scene of her own.) There is a brushstroke plot involving an inquest into Miss Havisham's death, but the opera is really a star vehicle for a coloratura. Argento had Beverly Sills in mind when he began work two years ago. She agreed...
...surrounded by Pip, the haughty Estella, the lawyer Jaggers, the convict Magwitch, Miss Havisham could be the kind of flamboyant character, drawn with simple, sharp lines, on which operas thrive. Mozart used a similar virago, the Queen of the Night, in The Magic Flute. But Pip, Estella and Jaggers (Magwitch is left out entirely) appear and disappear, little more than shadows crossing Miss Havisham's feverish brain...
MARRIED. Phyllis George, 29, television personality and former Miss America (1971); and John Y. Brown, 44, millionaire co-owner of basketball's Boston Celtics; both for the second time; in Manhattan...