Word: operas
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...happened to glance into a crowded elevator in the lobby of New York's Metropolitan Opera last month at the world premiere of The First Emperor. Before the doors closed I had just a second to register the familiar face and stocky figure of Henry Kissinger. Why should I be surprised? It was only natural that the men who, as President Nixon's Secretary of State, had opened relations between the U.S. and the People's Republic of China should be in attendance at Lincoln Center for the Met's first-ever opera by a Chinese composer-conductor...
...staged by Zhang Yimou, director of many sublime Chinese dramas, including Hero, the worldwide martial arts hit for which Tan Dun had supplied the music. Further, the costumes are by Emi Wada, who worked with Zhang on Hero and House of Flying Daggers. And even further, the opera is based on a 1996 Chinese movie, The Emperor's Shadow...
...field, though, their humanity all too often pokes through. We know - how could we not in these days of blanket coverage? - that even the greatest stars have faults. Warne epitomizes this sad fact better than most. His off-field antics sometimes seem lifted from a soap opera script: fined for giving a bookmaker information about "weather conditions"; suspended for using a banned drug that can mask steroid use; divorced after a series of lurid extramarital affairs. Little wonder that Warne's early teammates nicknamed him Hollywood. He is, noted cricket writer Peter Roebuck recently, "an unusual blend of immaturity...
...urgency to the entire show. Elvis was attitude, J.B. was epic drama. Other singers had their little 2min. narratives of sexual depression or release; Brown?s show was a kind of musical play, ending with the (literally) show-stopping ?Please Please Please? - his death and resurrection as a comic-opera Calvary. The life story of a man was enacted in song and dance, with Eros as the main course and Thanatos for dessert...
...turns into a brutal quagmire. Terrorist sleepers turn the public paranoid. And the victims of an attack find themselves sacrificing liberty to defend it. Sound like any planet you know? The topical parallels became deeper and more chilling in Seasons 2 and 3 of this thinking viewer's space opera. It's like the Iraq Study Group report with starship fights and hot-looking robots...