Word: sopranos
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...voices that hold this lighthearted evening's entertainment together are sound. Both student and professional leads are musically competent enough to keep Donizetti's swoops and lilts of melody sounding natural, though some have less luck with the words. Margery Hellmond '83, who alternates with professional soprano Priscilla Ganley as Adina, brings a supple, textured voice to a series of intricate arias, though she occasionally becomes strident on the showy high notes...
...Mamelles fares better. The barbed wire is pushed off into a corner, and the sets are Dufy-bright and lively. The story, a gutsy farce that Poulenc took from a drama by Apollinaire, concerns a fed-up woman named Thérèse (Soprano Catherine Malfitano) who decides to quit the second sex by removing her breasts-really two bright balloons. Meanwhile, her husband (Baritone David Holloway) assumes female dress and godlike fecundity; in a day he/she produces 40,049 offspring. Eventually both resume their original genders and celebrate the need to repopulate the world after war. Among Hockney...
...Enfant was first produced in 1925, George Balanchine, then 21, provided the incidental choreography. But noble lineage does not burden this opera in the way that it does Satie's Parade, probably because it offers ample possibilities for different interpretations. The little boy (played by Mezzo-Soprano Hilda Harris) defies his mother, wrecks a pendulum clock, trashes a teapot, tears his books, rips the wallpaper off the wall, pulls the cat's tail and more...
...Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. Among the stops: Temple, Stillwater, San Marcos, Eagle Pass, Seguin and Harlingen. At times on such jaunts, a TOT engagement looks less like a brush with Parnassus than a rest stop at Parris Island. "I think it's like the Olympics," says Mezzo-Soprano Susanne Mentzer. "You have to sing, act, put on makeup and ride the bus on top of everything else." A measure of flexibility in casting is required: Galbraith sings the baritone role of Marcello in La Bohème, as well as the bass role of Dandini in Cinderella...
...verbal intricacies that are his trademark fall prey to melodic ineptitude. Syllables lost in an overly complicated soprano line and choral numbers that have the gentility of a shouting match leave us frustrated. Though nearly always glittering, certain lyrics seem gratuitous as Hugh Wheeler's book parcels out plot in neat bits of dialogue. With such a story-laden vehicle, tangential songs become tiresome; we yearn for songs with more plot in them. Sondheim and Wheeler sensed this tendency for Sweeney to drag and judiciously chopped out half of an appallingly dull number in moving the show from New York...