Word: opera
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...emergence to compare with Napoleon's journey out of Elban exile to try to regain France. Nor was it precisely the great soap opera of redemption that occurred in the mid-'50s when the American people decided that Ingrid Bergman, disgraced adulteress, might be restored to favor. But somewhere in the historic procession from the majestic to the trivial, one might plausibly place Richard Nixon's trip to Hyden, Ky., over the Fourth of July weekend...
When artists of the Peking Opera take over, the pace speeds up. A pair of dancer-acrobat-mimes, on a fully lit stage, pantomime a sword fight as it might be conducted between opponents who cannot see each other in a pitch-black room. The movement is wondrously intricate, breathtakingly quick-and hugely comic. In another excerpt, called Monkey Makes Havoc in Heaven, the stage is filled with men, tumbling, bounding, flailing at one another in a skirmish between the forces of a Peer Gyntish Monkey King and a Jade Emperor whose court has been invaded by the delightfully wicked...
...these pieces-carefully selected samples of what they believe to be the best of their theatrical culture-are being offered by the Performing Arts Company of the People's Republic of China. A five-city U.S. tour began last week at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, and will play in Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, Berkeley and Los Angeles. The opening-night program left memories of sumptuous and exotic stage pictures that will linger in the mind's eye and a sense that one has enjoyed a handful of highly privileged theatrical moments...
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...
...function publicly, must either embrace the gaseous platitudes of revolution or bury themselves in popular, native tradition. Chinese ballet, for instance, was hobbled when authorities decided to erase any Russian influences. Folk singing and dancing seem to be much safer areas to cultivate. So is something like the Peking Opera, which relies on timeless myths, harmless fairy tales, for its plots, and prizes acrobatics and mimetic movement...