Word: planet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...richest, Saul Bellow's freestyle prose reads as if a Division Street Dostoyevsky were writing a book called Thus Spake the Nobel Savage. In Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), the author's tone took a Spenglerian edge as the novel's elderly New Yorker ruminated on the decline of the West Side and, inferentially, civilization as the author knows and reveres it. Sammler had political repercussions. Bellow was accused of being aloof, insensitive and a neoconservative. He has calmly and disdainfully rejected these labels as simplistic...
...formation--but their capacity to charm and delight is endless. All five are top-flight performers: well-suited vocally for Handel's soft, delicate arias, and passionate and convincing as actors. Sanford Sylvan reveres every syllable he sings as Orlando, and his gentle descent into madness (represented as the planet Mars in this production) is mesmerizing. Janet Brown's rendition of the queen/deb Angelica's melancholy reflection on false hopes is another high-point: sweetly sung but bitterly felt. (The ART has double cast Orlando, the singers in the performance I saw were Sharon Baker, Robert Honeysucker, and Mary Kendrick...
Mimi and her debutante friends should be locked in a time capsule and sent to a distant planet. Let the whole universe know why there was a budget deficit...
Like life, the series begins slowly. Attenborough ventures back to the planet's earliest days, some 3 billion or so years ago. DNA molecules lead to bacteria, which in turn are transformed into protozoans. Over hundreds of millions of years, the oceans begin to swarm with increasingly complicated forms of life. The records from those days are scanty at best, and, to the layman, one fossil looks much like another. There may be books in running brooks and sermons in stones, but they do not translate very well into...
...while there is a brief frisson when the specter is revealed to be wearing several pounds of yucky decayed-corpse makeup instead of Actress Alice Krige's pretty face. But since these moments arise out of a script that appears to have been mailed in from another planet and directed by the spirit of the living dead, they are with out any emotional charge. And since Krige has proved herself a performer of range and spirit in Chariots of Fire, the failure to employ her as something more than a mannequin is particularly galling...