Word: seraglio
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Painted Rats. Later, on another set, the director swung aloft on a crane over an indoor water tank to film an enormous caged seraglio at the edge of a Venice canal. "Motore!" he shouted, and the cameras rolled. The harem was wild with excitement as Casanova's gondola glided past. Fellini exhorted the girls chosen for the scene to climb their cage like monkeys to get a better view. "Higher, Fernanda!" he roared through a megaphone. "Climb higher and hang those lovely boobs of yours through the bars." The girl followed instructions, hung on precariously and was rewarded...
...place as a formidable European power. Granada is sporadically allied with England, but by 1865 the two countries nearly go to war, the author roguishly reports. Why? Because the poet Swinburne, who in real life had curious difficulties with the opposite sex, is killed while adventuring in the royal seraglio. The scandal is smoothed over, however, partly because of the good feeling left by the fervently pro-Moorish writings of Lord Byron, who does not die at Missolonghi in 1824, according to Guedalla, but lives on in Granada until...
...painfully stiff early imitations of Rubens (like Henri IV Conferring the Regency on Marie de' Medici) are much to the fore in this show, was able in maturity to go back to his great prototype and produce such majestically sensual works as Turkish Women Bathing (1854), an outdoor seraglio, a blend of Venus garden and fete champetre. In the event, it was Rubens who saved classical mythology for the romantics by rescuing it from its scholarly imbrications. By the same token, he rescued historical allegory by giving it the unique straightforwardness, the solidity and dazzle that his followers could...
...Seraglio predates The Impresario by four years and is written in the style of the Singspiel (literally, song-play), the popular 18th century German comic opera. These days it needs a clever stage style-or more expert clowning-to make a convincing evening. This, alas, the opera failed to get from Director Anthony Besch, who unaccountably kept the action stiff and stately...
Fortunately, the music of Seraglio is one glorious moment after another, and here there was no disappointment...