Word: operaâ
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...coloratura role of Cleopatra in Handel's Julius Caesar. She repaid City Opera by becoming the bestselling box-office draw in its 34-year history. Last January, when Sills, 49, announced that she would end her singing career in 1980, she promised that she would stay on at City Opera???as co-director with Julius Rudel, 57, her mentor and director of the company for 21 years. Last week "Good Queen Bev," as Rudel has called her since her smashing performances in Donizetti's royal trilogy (Roberto Devereux, Maria Stuarda, Anna Bolena), took on the biggest and riskiest role...
Lloyd Webber, dark, slender and intense, likes to point out defensively that this is his first opera???a defense that only someone who knows Verdi's first opus can fully appreciate. Rice, tall and blond, finds inspiration in the rhyming dictionary, talks like a character out of a book by his favorite novelist, P.G. Wodehouse, and looks like somebody's kid brother home for the long hols. If fame and fortune have not yet disturbed them, it may be because so much of it has come in the U.S. "The LP record is an absolute dud in England," Rice explains...
...those hired were skilled. Many strange things had to be found for the white collar people to do. For example, last week in Missouri a group of professional singers headed by Miss Edna Haseltine was hired at 35¢ an hour, sent out into the Ozark hills to give grand opera???only it was not called that for fear the natives would not attend. Admissions charged in different towns were turned back to buy materials for local CWA projects. Elsewhere unemployed musicians were hired to give public symphonies, unemployed actors to give public plays. Said Mr. Hopkins: "Great art ... is confined...
Iolanthe. It has become so much a fixed custom to gurgle happy criticisms over any Gilbert and Sullivan opera???just because it is Gilbert and Sullivan?that lolanthe as produced by Winthrop Ames left a lot of people without adjectives. It is generally agreed that in this entertainment he has done the best job of any producer attempting one of the famous series in our time. The only anxiety now is that he may be distracted before he has revived everyone of the operas in an equally felicitous vein...
Since Mr. Drinkwater has made use of Burns' poems, there is besides Robert Burns probably only one other play in the English language?The Beggars' Opera??? with an equal number of good ballads...