Word: operas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...male buddies, poised at the uneasy boundary between youth and middle age, sprawl in an overdecorated apartment and dish the dirt about opera singers. None can meet their fierce standards except Maria Callas (a performance by whom provides the play's title). They admire her for blending technique and emotion and, more deeply, for enduring a sad life and lonely death. Other artists, they say, impersonate the passion and hysterics of opera; she lived them...
When the action shifts to his minimalist pad, where he surprises his lover in bed with a boyfriend, he caroms between Noel Coward worldliness and Edward Albee combat, hinting at suicide, half attempting murder. In earlier versions of the play, the bloody pathos of opera found a parallel: the abandoned man stabbed his lover, then held him in a last embrace. That ending felt arch. This one feels anticlimactic, void of release. So does the end of an affair, an event McNally chronicles with specific detail and authentic, universal pain...
...Connecticut's Goodspeed Opera House engagingly shifts vintage Gershwin to 1920s Harlem. Tony winner Ron Richardson (Big River) stars...
Last week, however, the soap-opera proceedings turned deadly serious for Jim Bakker. Convicted 19 days earlier of fraudulently raising $158 million in contributions from his adoring flock, the smooth-talking, scandal-plagued televangelist drew a stunning 45-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine...
...society, it rivaled New York City and Paris, and it took perverse pride in its reputation, well earned by the depravity of the carnal Barbary Coast, as "the wickedest city in the world." The evening of April 17, when the nonpareil Enrico Caruso sang in Carmen at the Grand Opera House before repairing to the fabulous Palace Hotel (a telephone and bath for every room, no less), was simply the glittering usual. As the populace drifted to sleep that night, all was well. Who could have dreamed that in only a few hours little would remain of this luminous metropolis...