Word: pushkins
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Cranko's work is at its best in extended ballets with strong dramatic substance. Opening the company's three-week New York visit was one of his best, an evening-long interpretation of Pushkin's intensely romantic verse-drama Eugene Onegin. Two nights later, the company presented an even more stunning tour deforce, a balletic version of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. Both were lavishly mounted, eye-filling pieces. Onegin uses a score by Music Director Kurt-Heinz Stolze based on short pieces by Tchaikovsky. The work moves quickly and assuredly through Pushkin...
...Lermontov himself comes into direct conflict with the Czar and must choose whether to run off or to stay for a fixed duel which will make it obvious that he is being killed by the Czar, thus following in Pushkin's footsteps...
Shea concentrates on and sometimes interprets certain elements in the lives of Pushkin and Lermontov that stress their roles as political actors and as outsiders to the system. Pushkin was the descendent of a Negro slave to the Czar and was dark himself, a fact not commonly known. In this play, he is portrayed by a black actor, mainly to stress his sense of difference and his antipathy toward the Czar. In Lermontov's life, too, the political acts are highlighted: his eulogy to Pushkin at Pushkin's funeral (based on the real Lermontov's poem), dangerous because Pushkin...
...theme of Don Juan is also used throughout the play to good purpose in emphasizing the estrangement of the two artists from the rest of society. In the first part, Pushkin and his wife attend Don Giovanni. Pushkin admires Mozart because he, too, was a natural genius, and he admires the Don Juan theme because its hero is a man who "did not take things as they are." Pushkin's most famous poem, Eugene Onegin, is a treatment of that subject, and it is partly on this poem and partly on Byron's Don Juan that Lermontov bases the story...
...production of the play has some interesting points, too. Film is used, but not to show actions that are important psychologically, Shea points out. Rather, the film sequences show major events in the lives of the characters that they then have to deal with. Pushkin watches the bloody raid on the Decembrist Revolutionists by forces of the Czar on film, and Lermontov watches the death of Pushkin on film. Later, the Czar sees part of Lermontov's novel, which he terms "self-indulgent," on the screen...