Word: seraglio
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...setting classics in the more recent past - last season saw Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème staged in the fragile interwar period of 1930s Paris. But while other European opera houses experiment with extreme directorial conceits - Germany's Komische Oper recently performed Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio in an S&M torture chamber - the ENO has found a way to make old favorites feel revitalized rather than remade. "We have to remember what made these classics great in the first place," Berry explains. (See pictures of London...
...whomever. Dad Suddhodana, who would rather Siddhartha become an earthly king, manufactures this hedonism, hoping to shield his son from the world's anguish and thereby stanch any desire of Siddhartha to redeem it. A pleasure dome he decrees, turning the top floor of his palace into a lurid seraglio and confining Siddhartha there, "ensnared by women skilled in erotic arts/ who were tireless in providing sexual delights." The teenage St. Augustine would have been jealous...
...deadly with a blade and, beneath his armored persona, stubbornly loyal. Those qualities animate the newly translated Purity of Blood. Alatriste is hired to help an aging father free his daughter, a nun, from the clutches of a well-connected priest who is using the convent as his private seraglio. The old man and his family have a secret: as Christian descendants of a converted Jew in anti-Semitic times, they lack "purity of blood" and soon become targets of the Inquisition. Alatriste too comes under suspicion, and the blood, pure and otherwise, begins to flow. Like the other Alatriste...
...character of his brothel scenes is that of inaction, waiting, even boredom, and in this they were perfectly true to the social world they addressed, since most of the life of a girl in a maison close was taken up with sitting around. The tedium of the big-city seraglio becomes monumental, almost Egyptian, with In the Salon at the Rue des Moulins, circa...
...where Ron is sent to recuperate is an open sewer teeming with rats, drugs and whores. Back in Massapequa, Ron is now the flinching veteran used as a prop for patriotism, and family life is a ceaseless, sickening debate about the war. Even in Mexico, at a kind of seraglio for impotent veterans, he finds little sympathy among his own crippled kind. He looks into the angry face of his buddy Charlie (Willem Dafoe) and finds a mirror of his own grotesque despair. He has hit bottom...