Word: opera
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Playing by Heart often feels like a high-budget soap opera, with so many characters and thin, unoriginal dialogue. Each relationship is basically stereotypical, with some clever little twists sprinkled in from time to time. There are so many names and details to remember that the director often provides scenes that reiterate redundant plot developments for the less observant or the temporarily narcoleptic viewer. First, there are Paul (Connery) and Hannah (Rowlands), as older married couple experiencing conflict on the eve of the reconfirmation of their wedding vows. Trent (Stewart) is a slick lawyer pursuing Meredith (Anderson), a neurotic theater...
...spite of some minor technical difficulties (the stage broke), the Dunster House Opera (DHO) gave a sell-out performance of Leonard Bernstein's opera/musical version of Voltaire's Candide last weekend. The cast, particularly Joseph Nuccio'00 had a great deal of fun with an already witty, sarcastic and sexually infused libretto. Audience laughter often echoed the mirth of the lighthearted and light-footed cast...
...which are announced this week, are easy to recognize. To really impress folks, you need to be able to name the obscure baubles on their shelves too. Match these trophies with their honors. The Spielbergs are not eligible. a) People's Choice Award (for film and TV); b) Soap Opera Award; c) Palme d'Or (from the Cannes Film Festival); d) Screen Actors Guild Award; e) VH1 Fashion Award; f) Country Music Award...
...Jerusalem Disease was neither wonderfully performed nor exceptionally well-written; instead it was a very watcheable soap-opera: "Dawson's Creek" featuring skinny guys in tassel loafers. In fine post-adolescent form, the play melodramatizes the trivial and passes lightly over the truly significant. It is hard to imagine anybody in the audience actually caring about the conflicts the play poses; even the protagonists seem strangely nonchalant about what would strike most mature people as the play's central conflict--an alleged teenage suicide--preferring instead to fight about who is dating whom and what pain is caused...
...soap-opera, the conflicts in The Jerusalem Disease are simple and easy to identify with, especially for a college audience: the protagonists are boys just out of high school struggling with the questions of adjustment to adult life and the formation of adult identities. But, also as in a soap-opera, the setting is unusual enough to excite the audience to interest; in the case of most television teen soap-operas, what makes the setting unusual is a remarkably generalized beauty, a kind of atmospheric attractiveness that immediately romanticizes the proceedings, however trivial. Here, there's a quite different kind...