Word: scipio
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Most people believe that the caesarean operation is so named because Julius Caesar was born that way. Most people are wrong. Julius had a normal delivery, but he is linked to that operation because an early ancestor, Scipio Africanus, was excised from his mother's dead body. To mark his miraculous birth, Scipio's father called him "the cut-out one"-or in Latin, Caesar. Actually, the operation predates even the first Caesar by centuries. It is one of the oldest on record, but was performed only after the mother had died. The first known caesarean...
...players. Barbara Colby is uncannily believable as Caligula's almost worn out but vapidly feminine mistress, and Jerome Raphel appears as strong, conscious and submissive as one could hope Caligula's ex-slave bodyguard to be. Only Joseph Hindy, who plays Caligula's naive, sensitive and ultimately rejected friend, Scipio, seems out of place on this fine stage. His movements are stiff, he slouches, and he swallows too many lines...
There is, however, one statement you make with which I take issue-that one cannot play a wind instrument. I can give a spirited (and recognizable) rendition of Drink to Me Only on the tin whistle. My encore, Handel's Scipio, is not quite so virtuoso...
...theater rose one night last week for one of the wackiest premieres in operatic history. Presumably, the select group of invited critics and music lovers came with the expectation of hearing The Spanish Lady and The Roman Cavalier, a retitle for Alessandro Scarlatti's long-forgotten comic opera, Scipio in Spain, composed in 1714. What they got was Scarlatti heavily laced with Salvador Dali, theatrical effects, erotic dancers and leering double-entendres...
...minor actors, from Caligula's clean-cut ROTC army to Scipio (a sweet young poet who wears a turtle neck sweater and an Italian zoot-suit), were mild, unprepossessing, and without talent. But from the gray haze of the production emerge the performances of Lynn Milgrim and David Gullette as Caesonia and Caligula. Miss Milgrim's asset is her presence, her ability to command the stage. She is a marble statue on a stage of mannequins...