Word: sellarsization
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Above all, Sellars's updating never interferes with the music. In fact, many of his innovations involve clever exploitation of the Handel score. The bouncy rhythms of Dorinda's first-act aria on the ineffable nature of love--she's the beach bunny, nee shepherdess--become the excuse for an...
IF THERE IS ANY FLAW in Peter Sellars's recasting of Orlando it is his tendency towards cryptic, coyly symbolic staging. Why, for instance, is there so much rolling around? Why does Zoroastro mug and wave at the audience incessantly? And why are all those cardboard boxes littering the stage...
Sellars offers explanations for many of his departures in the scene-by-scene synopsis he has prepared for Orlando's audiences. Though gratuitously academic at times ("In an extraordinary passage in 5/8 time, considered outlandish and daring in the 18th century, Orlando crosses the river Styx...) and occasionally pretentious ("What...
Sellars is now part of a distinguished tradition of opera-synopsis parodies--an art whose greatest practitioner was without a doubt the late Robert Benchley. Benchley's account of Act II of Die Meister-Genossenschaft is especially instructive:
Peter Sellars's version of Orlando is not a work of Handel scholarship, any more than Benchley's synopsis is a work of Wagner scholarship. But Benchley's spirit is in many ways Sellars's as well: an abundant wit, a vaguely lunatic sense of the absurd--and just the...