Word: operas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
From the opening curtain on, exoticism was in the air. Leningrad's Kirov Ballet, embarking on a four-city, eight-week U.S. tour, chose to lead off its engagement at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House last week with Le Corsaire, a full-length ballet that very few Americans have ever seen. The kind of diversion that appealed to 19th century audiences in Paris or St. Petersburg, Le Corsaire now seems a genuine novelty, and, like the Kirov itself, it signaled that something fresh and curious can still be found in the post- glasnost era of big tours and cultural exchanges...
...hard to say. No one is credited with writing the book. The wry and suave lyrics are attributed to Don Black, who was Lloyd Webber's main collaborator on Song and Dance, and to Charles Hart, whose words were the weakest part of Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera. Major contributions were surely made by the composer and by director Trevor Nunn, and the storytelling is also enhanced by Maria Bjornson's dreamlike designs. They shift fluidly from a naturalistic mansion courtyard to a mountain range at sunset conveyed by just a jagged line of reddish purple across...
...LISBON TRAVIATA. Terrence McNally's homosexual tragicomedy features opera, violence and a terrific cast of off-Broadway veterans...
...ASPERN PAPERS (PBS, June 9, 9 p.m. on most stations). First time on TV for Dominick Argento's opera based on the Henry James novella, in a production from the Dallas Opera...
...first act of China's great political drama of 1989 was played out with the panoply and sweep of a revolutionary grand opera. While much of the world watched, for a time, via satellite TV transmission, hundreds of thousands of students and sympathizers filled Beijing's Tiananmen Square, demanding greater democratization and an end to nepotism and corruption. On Saturday, May 20, with the government and the Chinese capital paralyzed, the curtain rang down ominously on Act I: Premier Li Peng, a principal target of the demonstrators' wrath, and President Yang Shangkun imposed martial law; troops from the People...