Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Forbes. The libretto is as cluttered with conflicts as an O'Neill play, but it does not have half the dramatic impact. This comes as something of a surprise. Floyd's creed is that opera can succeed today only if the composer pays as careful attention to plot as if he were writing a play: the audience must believe the story...
...Puritani contains scarcely any drama at all. What plot it has concerns two noble lovers who are temporarily made unhappy by conflicting allegiances to Cavaliers and Roundheads in 17th century England. The opera unfolds like a torpid, benign Lucia di Lammermoor: it has a hero who prefers politics to love, a heroine who goes mad. By the time all turns out for the best, it is hard to remember what went wrong: three scenes contain no action of any kind...
...curious things about HPT 128 is that plot seems to suffer from the toned-down atmosphere, almost as if the sexism is an integral part of the show, and men just running around in drag and telling silly jokes isn't enough. I've never been to a Pudding show before so I can't tell, but I hear plot has usually been weak; this year it's about as thin as a slide-specimen. Innocent Kitty Kaboodle comes to New York during the Depression with hopes of instant stardom, or at least she says she's marked...
WHAT HOLDS TOTS IN TINSELTOWN together--it sprawls over 12 scenes in two acts--is this sense of showmanship: all of the actors and actresses want to make it big in entertainment. Where the plot doesn't hold up, the Hollywood fantasies or the fact that everybody thinks of themselves as entertainers carry things through. The idea that this is show biz makes some of the songs and dances a little less adventitious than they normally are in musicals. The chorus-line number, for instance, which has to be stuck in every year, is introduced by Preston, who says...
Dant's Purgatorio and Shakespeare's King Lear serve the same function for Purgatory as Milton's Paradise Lost did for Mintz, supplying characters, plot details and many of the show's cleverest lines. The thematic link between the Lear and Purgatorio motifs is the search for a missing woman who represents some kind of an ideal. For LaZebnik's Lear, who is both actor and director in a play about himself, it is Cordelia who is lost, while for Thomas, the young male lead, it is the elusive Adeline, who takes the place of Dante's Beatrice. Since Tome...