Word: nero
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sterling characters ranging from a Cantabrigian historian to a gentleman's gentleman, who almost rates a novel by himself. Young Churchill makes an appearance. The suffragists and the Irish troubles and Kaiser Wilhelm crowd in, sometimes hilariously. Edward VII comes across -accurately-as a spoiled, imperious near Nero who nonetheless had a regal way with bridge, economics and foreign policy. The novel ends in 1914, four years after Edward's death, as the honeyed England of Rupert Brooke's young dreams slides toward the nightmare of Wilfred Owen's trenches...
...your abilities, but I know my size has gotten me jobs." Among actors who might be on any producer's list: Orson Welles, an epic creator who is known to the television generation as the butt of Johnny Carson's fat jokes; William Conrad, TV's Nero Wolfe; Raymond Burr, old Ironside; and Burt Young, the Gibraltar of Rocky. Perhaps the most stereotyped of all is Victor Buono. Fat from childhood, Buono reached 400 Ibs. before a recent diet took him down to 350. He played Bette Davis' father in Hush, Hush'. . . Sweet Charlotte when...
...have taken a vote and come up with the "ten most villainous people in history," a collection of rotters guilty of sins even more grievous than wearing brown shoes with a blue suit. The envelope, please. In chronological order: Caligula, despotic Emperor of Rome from A.D. 37 to 41; Nero, full-time Emperor and sometime violinist who struck sour notes in Rome from 54 to 68; Attila the Hun, who led his barbaric tribe from 433 to 453; Ivan the Terrible, nogoodnik Tsar of Russia from 1547 to 1584; Catherine de Medicis, Machiavelli-mentored Queen of France from...
...across the long stretches of parlando, or singing speech. His advice paid off, for the performance had an unselfconscious ease about it that helped to eliminate any difficulties the audience might have had with the style, dry by conventional standards but supple and expressive. Especially impressive was the Nero of Susan Larson, taking a part originally written for a male soprano; the Arnalta of Tenor Karl Dan Sorensen, playing a nursemaid in another of the opera's travesty roles; and the Ottone of Countertenor Jeffrey Gall. Kerry McCarthy made a vocally handsome, icily regal Poppea. Pearlman translated Giovanni Francesco...
Stage Director Jack Eddleman's predilection for repeating certain stage pictures-such as lovers lying head to toe -was ultimately predictable. But Eddie-man was right in pointing up some of the decadence of Nero's reign: although the opera ends with the marriage of Nero and Poppea, set to one of the most beautiful love duets in operatic literature, Nero was, historically, not a man to be trusted. He later kicked the pregnant Poppea to death, and once married a boy-but only after he ordered the youth to be castrated...