Word: schiller
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...with Brandt, Pompidou had made up his mind to sack Premier Jacques Chaban-Delmas, replacing him with Old Gaullist Pierre Messmer. Brandt, in turn, had in his pocket an angry five-page letter of resignation from the man who until recently had been the star of his Cabinet, Karl Schiller, the super-Minister who held both the Finance and Economics portfolios...
...Regina!, with Claire Bloom as Mary and Eileen Atkins as Elizabeth, has just finished a Broadway run and is scheduled to go on tour in the fall. Also in New York, a musical called Elizabeth I had a short run, and at Lincoln Center there was an adaptation of Schiller's Maria Stuart-not to mention a production of Donizetti's Maria Stuarda at the New York City Opera...
...become a kind of historical scrabble. Was Mary's husband, Darnley, for instance, a womanizing lech as Vivat has it? Or was he a homosexual as the movie has it? (He seems to have been the former.) The popular version of the story, accepted by those raving romantics Schiller and Donizetti, portrays Mary as a high-brogue Joan of Arc and Elizabeth as the Wicked Witch of the West. The new versions, sometimes wildly inaccurate in other ways, do at least correct that longstanding libel against poor Bess. The truth is that Mary probably was an accomplice...
Though the two Queens were never within shouting distance of one another, romantic playwrights and librettists could not resist bringing them together in a dramatic confrontation. On this point, the new scriptwriters split. Hollywood does Schiller's and Donizetti's single meeting one better and stages two, both full of ear-splitting cliches and sounding uncannily like a commercial for Tide or Cheer. In Vivat, Bolt finds his own not particularly happy solution by placing Elizabeth and Mary onstage at the same time, but in separate scenes. TV's Elizabeth R, by far the most accurate...
...Schiller's play and Donizetti's opera (which followed Schiller) were born of an age when Mary was a stock romantic heroine. In the Donizetti particularly, the role makes a stunning vehicle for opera's finest singing actress, Beverly Sills. The newer playwrights and scriptwriters are less certain what to do with the character of Mary. They cannot make up their minds whether she is good, bad or half-and-half, and their ambiguity perplexes and defeats the actresses who find themselves in the role. Mary is as hard for modern writers to understand as Elizabeth...