Word: servants
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Conceived by Paris Opéra General Director Rolf Liebermann, Don Giovanni is an attempt to go beyond the usual filmed operatic performances or made-for-TV studio productions. Joseph Losey (The Servant, The Go-Between) takes his cast of international singing stars out on location to the waterways of Venice and to some stunning Palladian villas in the countryside around Vicenza. Never mind that Ingmar Bergman's 1975 version of Mozart's The Magic Flute showed what enchanting results a modest, studio-bound production could achieve. Never mind, too, that the locale of the Don Juan legend...
There is a glint of extravagant humor in the recital of the Don's conquests by his servant Leporello, with the list stretching down the steps of his house and out into the garden; but José Van Dam's engaging Leporello is scarcely allowed to become the buffo scalawag that Mozart and Da Ponte had in mind. Edda Moser as Donna Anna, Teresa Berganza as Zerlina, Kenneth Riegel as Don Ottavio, all throw themselves into their roles with intensity, but only the exotic Kiri Te Kanawa, as Donna Elvira, manages to shake off some of Losey...
...migrés, always from the provinces of the heart, often from some place in Europe tossed by convulsions of war or politics. One story follows the sad, late return (1950) to Berlin of a German prisoner of war in France. Another recounts the trials of an Italian servant girl on the Riviera, working for a neurotic English couple just before Mussolini declared war on France...
Caucasian Chalk Circle, currently being produced by the Harvard Law School Drama Society, boldy pits the bourgeois authority--manifested in the persons of the governor of a Caucasian Village and his wife--against the simple stolidity of the proletariat, in the person of Grusha, their servant girl. The backdrop is the bloody imbroglio of civil war. Grusha, simply and sincerely portrayed by Brooke Stark, retrieves the governor's child. Michael, who has been left behind in the frenzied exodus from the Village. She protects the baby throughout the conflict, risking her personal safety as well as her love...
Things look rosy at the wedding until Cardinal Pandulph, the Papal Legate, orders France not to ally herself with England as long as John refuses to support the Church's choice for Archbishop of Canterbury. In the ensuing battle, John captures Arthur and orders Hubert, a faithful servant, to kill the boy. Hubert cannot bids him escape, claiming Arthur died in his sleep...