Word: operas
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India's movie industry specializes in raucous mythological epics; melodramatic histrionics are the mainstay of Italian opera. The two worlds collided in New Delhi this week with the triumphant return to politics of Sonia Gandhi. The Italian-born widow of slain prime minister Rajiv Gandhi reclaimed the reins of her Congress party Tuesday, after rowdy protests, pleading deputations and even an attempted self-immolation by a despairing supporter coaxed her out of a self-imposed week in the political wilderness. Promising that "every drop of my blood belongs to this country," Gandhi galvanized party activists for a head-on battle...
...culture of the Civil War (with a flavor directly taken from the Taoist hermits of old China). It was replaced by another debut novel set, for nearly all its 428 pages, in the teahouses of Kyoto in the 1930s. Just as last year, during the Capitol soap opera, the American public showed itself wiser than its rulers, so in our free time, it's proving itself more discerning than those who would wish to take it to the cleaners...
America fascinated him. In his work he turned it into a country as schematized, imaginative and compelling as the America of the Weill-Brecht opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny: flat horizons broken by buttes or movie palaces, bulbous baroque autos, all-leg girls and cowboys teetering on their high heels like stilts. Never vagrant or fussy, always economical, his line described conundrums that were at the heart of an artist's identity concerns: a little image, for instance, of a man with a pen whose drawn nib is drawing himself. To Steinberg, each drawing remade...
...been a grand season for American opera. First the New York City Opera and the Met produced Carlisle Floyd's Of Mice and Men and Susannah, respectively, and now Menotti's The Consul--a tough, blunt cliff-hanger about political persecution--has finally made it to CD in a splendid live recording from last year's Spoleto Festival. The cast is solid; Richard Hickox's conducting, superb. Successfully premiered on Broadway in 1950 (yes, Broadway used to take such chances), The Consul is a little masterpiece of musical stagecraft whose grimly effective score and libretto haven't lost...
...button only switches the set to a low-power mode, during which advertising copy appears noiselessly on the screen." Or a network's "Seamlessness Initiative": the characters in each show connect to the characters on all the other shows, so that "the star of the afternoon soap opera The Naked and the Damned (formerly Trailer Park) would appear as a contestant on the game show Quacks like a Duck." Or, in one of the book's funniest running motifs, the transplantation of a pig liver into the female protagonist's father, a Hollywood hustler of exceptional charm and exceptional coarseness...