Word: serpents
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...priestess Salammbo danced to the seductive warbling of a flute, her long white dress slowly fell to the ground, and she stood naked before the sacred python. Taking the serpent in her arms, she "wound it round her waist, under her arms, between her knees . . . Salammbo gasped beneath this weight . . . her back bent, she felt she was dying; and with the tip of its tail it gently flicked her thigh...
...spent actors. And a few of the scenes are downright inexplicable. During one interminable aria, Sesto wrestles with a rubber snake, ties himself up with a garden hose, then connects the end of the hose to his arm. The program declares that Sesto is singing that, "The offended serpent never rests until its venom is spilled into the blood of the offender." Rubber hose, rubber snake, poison...nope, it's too subtle, I just...
...full of wisteria and white peacocks. Woven through these galleries are some of the most deliriously awful canvases of the 19th century, marvels of the salon in their day, high-finance porn of the ripest sort: Cabanel's The Birth of Venus, Clesinger's notorious Woman Stung by a Serpent. "Certainly we have bad paintings," sniffs Director Cachin. "We have only the 'greatest' bad paintings...
...denounced Stalin as "the undertaker of the Revolution," the betrayer of Spain; by 1952 he was painting a saintly Uncle Joe with a peace dove on one hand and the Stockholm peace petition in the other. Rivera's political life had as many twists and turns as the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl. It inflated his personal myth but obscured his achievement as a formal artist--by which, as the political characters in his murals fade into historical remoteness, he must be judged. For its public, this splendid show has set that process in motion, giving us back a great soul...
Mozart's idea of a grown-up fairy tale, The Magic Flute opens with the fair-haired Tamino, a self-proclaimed lost "son of royalty," being overtaken by a ferocious fire-breathing evil serpent represented in this production by some sort of kite. Fainting at such a sight, Tamino is saved by three bewitching and mysterious ladies--messengers of the "star radiant" Queen of the Night, who will continue to play a large role in Tamino's life...