Word: musicalization
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Gentlemen of Verona. What sets Twelfth Night above its immediate and more remote predecessors is its great skill in combining three plots, its masterly preparation for peak scenes, its more subtle and less garish character painting, the richness of thematic overtones and undertones, and the substantial integration of sung music into its spoken music...
...place in a far corner of the hall. They provide the accompaniment for two unspecified songs, followed by a dance (choreographed by Graciela Daniele) in which the white-masked members of the court all participate. We seem to be watching a traditional Twelfth Night masque. And all this preliminary music gives added point to the play's opening lines, in which Duke Orsino refers to the "excess" of music, to a "dying fall" (which is accurately fitted to a descending cadence), and finally requests a halt...
Philip Minor is less lavish with music than Freedman, and less self-indulgent in overall pacing. Although Minor commendably retains more of the text, his show is still a good twenty minutes shorter than the Stratford one. He has not, unfortunately, assembled a cast that is as skilled in classical diction as Freedman's players...
Harold Rome's music has an infectious amiability and moves the show along on dancing feet, though the level of choreography is primitive. Rome's lyrics achieve something that is perhaps rarer than wit, a good humor that arises from compassionate fellow feeling...
These, however, are obtained at a heavy cost in tedium. It is not merely that the brilliant material from the Peking Opera-that highly stylized mixture of comedy, acrobatics, music and mime that really has no Western equivalent-and popular Chinese dances-they put one pleasantly in mind of Radio City Music Hall choreography -are embedded in an evening in which an earnest soprano hymns the joys of revolutionary struggle, and musicians tootle and plink away on strange-sounding instruments. Nor does the dull excerpt from a revolutionary ballet showing a young woman abused by the minions of a wicked...