Word: regina
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...language instructors. Today they are widely used in the music world as well. Conductor Herbert von Karajan saved rehearsal time for last year's Salzburg Festival production of Die Walküre by having the singers study cassettes made from his earlier recording of the opera. Mezzo-Soprano Regina Resnik taped a recording of Adriana Lecouvreur on her cassette and is now using it to learn the role she will sing next season...
...Little Foxes, in addition to being 29 years old as a play, is six months old as a production. The cast has changed--most notably, Margaret Leighton has replaced Anne Bancroft as Regina--but the director has worked closely with both casts, and with the present one in its transfer to Boston. So the gangrene of laissez-faire has not set in: the production remains under Nichols' control, and it remains alive. Beyond that, however, there is little to be said for it. Nichols applies a certain technical craft to the play, but nothing so purposeful as a concept. Anticipating...
Even inside this restricted objective, Nichols falls short of success. An attempt to simulate awkwardness in the opening scene achieves only slowness. At the other interval when smart pacing could do much--the death of Regina's husband--Nichols throws it all away, so when Horace runs desperately up the stairs, the audience doesn't even gasp. Nichols, it is true, has a tolerable eye for blocking small groups: with 5 actors, he is happy; with 4 or 6 comfortable; with 3 or 7, resigned. But where it counts, with 1 or 100, he retreats stealthily into the confines...
...they win the tenor. Lower-voiced mezzo-sopranos, on the other hand, usually end up on the limelight's fringes, portraying a disappointed rival or a sister-and wishing they were sopranos. As a result, the soprano field tends to be overcrowded. Two decades ago, Bronx-born Regina Resnik, a dramatic soprano with a rich lower range, found the field so overcrowded that even her widely recognized abilities were not taking her to the top. "I was just a talented youngster compared with the great divas of the time," she says. "I sang the second Elsa to Flagstad...
...cast was brilliant. While Anne Bancroft (Regina) was playing for time, she looked like a panther who had faith in claws. A diabolical laugh ran through her voice whenever she gained the upper hand. And the times she lost control--my God, what a bitch...