Word: norma
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Should a woman lie to obtain an abortion? Norma McCorvey thought so when she cried rape 20 years ago. The ruse failed and she was forced to have the baby, but McCorvey became "Jane Roe," the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision guaranteeing reproductive freedom. Today, with the right to choose protected, the equal exercise of that right is in jeopardy, and important abortion proponents are urging women to follow McCorvey's example -- a strategy the Clinton Administration may eventually endorse, if only implicitly...
...recent years has been to bridge the gap between the musical and the opera, reclaiming the latter as a popular rather than elite form. An operatic reading does no disservice to Billy Wilder's film noir, which has been preserved more than adapted. The climax, when the fallen star Norma Desmond shoots her lover and he tumbles into a swimming pool, has opera's larger-than-life emotion. So does the denouement, as she lapses into madness and announces, to a Cecil B. DeMille visible only to her, that she is ready for her close-up. It is apt that...
...musicalizing Sunset Boulevard does not detract, it does not add much either. Of nine songs centered on Norma, just one achieves what dialogue alone could not. When she returns in what she imagines is triumph to the studio that dropped her two decades before, she envisions glories to come in As If We Never Said Goodbye. If the scene were spoken, her delusion would be pathetic. The song, in effect an interior monologue, defers her disillusionment to celebrate her undiminished presence. The assertive With One Look and the lilting, wistful New Ways to Dream are engaging paeans to bygone achievements...
Even so, Lloyd Webber's creation is probably better than the ponderous London performance. Director Trevor Nunn excels at narrative clarity, which is present in the original, but not at nuancing characters, which is sorely needed with such miscast stars. As Norma, renowned for delicate beauty, Patti LuPone is too tempestuous, too earthy and too coarse of feature, especially her aardvark nose. As her lover, Kevin Anderson looks pudding-faced and pudgy, so long gone to seed that the supposedly vast age difference disappears -- until the finale, when LuPone inexplicably appears 20 years older than she was moments before. While...
...realized this and allowed distinguished actors to put one of his plays on film. Problem is that by the time they receive this reward for services rendered, it may as well be a gold watch. When MGM made Romeo and Juliet in 1936, it cast Leslie Howard, 43, and Norma Shearer, 36, as the star-crossed teens. Laurence Olivier brought sepulchral dash to his Hamlet, but at 41 he was a bit too mature to play a college student convincingly in close...