Word: operas
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...high culture dead in America? Or have TIME's aesthetic taste buds gone dead? If all you can offer for "The Best Theater of 1996" is Rent as an updated opera, then American culture has indeed taken a dive. And as far as music is concerned, what happened to the brilliant performances of Wagner's Ring at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, or other noteworthy performances? How can watered-down rap as performed by the Fugees define what our culture should aspire to? Taste notwithstanding, you have completely ignored whole artistic genres. Your selection of the best should cover more...
...Carter thought the project was a smooth vehicle that Murphy could simply ride in, when it's really a hunk-a-junk the star needed to transform. Roper is issued a regulation villain (Michael Wincott, whose menacing baritone was used to better effect in the recent Jim Jarmusch corpse opera Dead Man) and a girlfriend in peril (British stunner Carmen Ejogo). A shame the star wasn't given a character to play, witty dialogue to speak or clever plot twists to unravel...
...think the movie has already opened and they've already seen it. Evita is, to be sure, in many ways a landmark: the most ambitious musical Hollywood has turned out in years; the culmination of an almost 20-year effort to bring the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice pop opera to the screen; the catalyst for a storm of political protest in the country where the real story took place; the inspiration for a line of makeup and a boutique at Bloomingdale's. It's an event...
...Evita frenzy will have to be justified by a measure of success at the box office. And that is far from certain. Madonna's presence onscreen has yet to be a big draw, and the massive publicity campaign cannot obscure the fact that Evita is a two-hour opera. "I don't know if it's going to be commercial," she says. "But I am 100 percent sure that I did the best job I could." That may not be enough to finally make Madonna a major movie star. But it has accomplished at least one thing: we're staring...
...Evita It might have been an Oliver Stone political screed or a Ken Russell hallucinogen; the lead actress might have been Meryl Streep or Michelle Pfeiffer. But here it is--20 years after Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber first produced their gorgeously cynical opera about Eva Peron--reimagined through the eye of director Alan Parker and the flesh of Madonna. The take is dense and studious, an aptly conservative adaptation of a pop classic; it lets the score seduce and the star shine. Madonna, who is up to the vocal demands of the role, makes Eva--sexual predator, social...