Word: operas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...American Nellie Forbush was a greater suspension of disbelief than many listeners were willing to make. Yet My Fair Lady was solid and assured, even if Jeremy Irons did not erase the memory of Rex Harrison as | Henry Higgins. And Carousel, with songstress Barbara Cook and opera bass Samuel Ramey as the ill-fated lovers, was thrilling...
Broadway shows, however, do not have to be cast with opera stars to be taken seriously. What they have to be first is respected. "There are great theater pieces of the teens, '20s and '30s that don't exist in performable form," laments McGlinn. "If a show closed out of town, the scores could be thrown out on the last night. A lot of pre-Oklahoma! Rodgers and Hart, Porter and Kern shows are gone forever. We're trying to reclaim from oblivion all the work of America's greatest writers and composers...
...American musical but a transatlantic cousin of the Viennese operetta whose patrimony also includes the harmonic and rhythmic vitality of jazz? The line from Johann Strauss and Franz Lehar to Frederick Loewe and Richard Rodgers is really very short. Far from being an exotic and irrational entertainment, opera is the most vital and popular of musical forms. Is Mozart's The Magic Flute, composed in the vernacular for the Viennese commercial theater, stuffy high art just because it is 200 years old and occasionally performed at the Met? That would be news to Mozart, who craved popular esteem and pointed...
Fish got to swim, birds got to fly: the best composers will always write seriously, even when they are frankly dressing their tunes for success. The move from Broadway to opera house -- from quotidian show to stage classic, in other words -- is well under way. The only difference is that now people are finally catching...
...world crazy about her. Teresa, who thinks Janice "should live on a black mountain and drink out of a skull," tells Huey, "You're spoiled by women. You think you got woman-love coming to you out of your destiny." But who, in a Shanley comic opera, can ignore la forza del destino? Huey has to get Janice back...