Word: passione
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Appeal lived up to its title, and this study of a wise, troubled priest and a rebellious young deacon is still going strong 160 performances later. Around the same time, Christopher Durang's Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You exploded off-Broadway. Written with the vindictive passion of a Jacobean tragedy and performed at a tempo the Marx brothers might have found taxing, Durang's one-act delight appeared on a sheaf of Ten Best lists. It has since moved to a larger Manhattan showcase, where it continues to win adherents...
...recent Pennsylvania Opera Theater production of Orlando Paladino, a work that alternates buffa elements with more serious moments, showed the best reason for giving Haydn's operas a hearing: their scores. To the lovesick knight Orlando (Tenor John Gilmore), crazed by a passion for Angelica, the Queen of Cathay, Haydn gave a stirring entrance that suggests the depths of the mad paladin's emotion. On Angelica (Soprano Randi Marrazzo), he lavished arias in each act that shimmer with dazzling coloratura and touching pathos. And for the finale, he composed a high-spirited, catchy septet that reconciles the conflicting...
...darkness the voice rose-young, proud, urgent, female and black. It was an exhortation that might have been addressed to the spellbinding pastor of a Harlem storefront church, or to a Black Panther stopping pedestrian traffic on a street corner in Oakland, or to an ardent buck accelerating into passion on an apartment-house roof in Atlanta. As it happens, the voice came from the back of a theater auditorium in Long Beach, Calif. It was shouted to the man onstage, who could lay claim to being all those people: minister to the oppressed, political agitator, champion womanizer. The Hollywood...
...hero wanders through a world of deceit where characters, unable to reveal themselves, become two-dimensional, walking enigmas. The role of Laura, the beautiful go-between, demands a constant aura of intensity from actress Laura Morante. But the part written as a never-relaxing alternation between grief and sexual passion, vctimizes her with its unplayability. Victor Cavallo as Adelfo, the worker-priest who feeds the pigs, also suffers from the flat script, which forces him to stay calm and distanced, his religious acceptance erecting a rigid, unbroken stoicism to block him from the audience. With such starkness, Bertolucci...
None of this means, though, that the pure vigor and passion can't put enough spin on the story to provoke a certain exhilaration. In this jewel-studded dagger-edged world, desperate passions in unshaded colors often seem more believable than subtleties could in their ability to ignite passions and away a throne. "Look," cries John at one point, cowering away from Richard. "He's got a knife!" "A knife," his mother screams back, "Of course he has knife! We all have knives! It's 1183 and we're barbarians!" For barbarians, the Plantagenets pack in impressive wallop...