Word: nilsson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...PRODUCTION, and the first stage performance ever, of The Point suffers from the misbegotten mission of its creator. Esquire Jauchem's idea of adapting Harry Nilsson's musical fantasy to live theater is frustrated by the simple problem that the original fantasy has little to gain from being fixed within the bounds of flesh and blood. Neither the story as a whole nor individual ideas have any desire to be enslaved by dramatization. The show unconsciously slips back towards its previous incarnation as a cartoon--a tendency that is illuminated by various visual aspects of the production such as costumes...
Originally a record released by Nilsson in 1971. The Point was televised twice as an animated cartoon based on the book of drawings that accompanied the album. The same year, director Jauchem got the idea of adapting it for the stage. That the basic plot structure--the adventures of a boy and his dog--isn't exactly new, might not matter if the details of this particular--version weren't equally old hat. Ostracized by a "lot of little pointy-headed people," for non-conformity (having a round, rather than a pointed, head), the boy Oblio (David Morse) is unjustly...
...Nilsson's music is too innocuous to be noteworthy, except to say that it drowns the singing voices from time to time. Too mediocre to be offensive, it too has the ring of a past genre that is just as well of dead...
AGAIN, ALMOST accidentally, the sheer triteness of Nilsson's script is often the richest source of humor. Oblio meets a heap of rocks, Rock Man (Gerald Bernstein), a "stone person" with a deep, throbbing double-bass of a voice and an endless stream of outdsted jargon, "Being a rock," he intones, "is a very...heavy...life. We rocks are impervious to heat. We...stay...cool," And his coolness increases, strangely enough in direct proportion to the number of his cliches, which come fast and furious. His advice to Oblio is to keep cool--like "Mother Nature sittin' at the console...
...when Nilsson, playing a mortal, sings at top volume, what does the superhuman Brunnhilde do? Last week the unlucky lady was Berit Lindholm, a well-known Brunnhilde in Europe making her Met debut. She turned out to be a slim, handsome woman with a thrilling mezzo register, but this did not help her with much of Brunnhilde's important music. Vickers sang Siegmund with wrenching intensity, which worked fine with Nilsson. But in the searing confrontation with Brunnhilde he was dramatically undermatched...