Word: splendid
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...world premiere presentation of A Monster Has Stolen the Sun is an ambitious and noteworthy production. Despite the fact that the play is set in the sixth century, Angus the carver's line, "It's a visual age...splendid effects turn the heads of the crowds," certainly rings true for the play today. The moving stage props, realistic backdrop, and effective lighting contribute significantly to the success of this feminist production on the Loeb Mainstage...
Henry, filmed documentary-style, gets its power from no-frills naturalism. The Cook, by contrast, is all artifice: splendid, meticulous, extravagant. One expects no less from the British writer-director Peter Greenaway, who with The Draughtsman's Contract and A Zed and Two Noughts revealed his gifts as a creator of murals on the subject of ruthless gamesmanship. His stories are hot, his style cool. His new film is the tale of a vicious crook (Michael Gambon) who dines nightly at a posh restaurant with his gang and his luscious, abused wife (Helen Mirren). Her pleasures are furtive but sweet...
...wound vulnerability that brings her fey lunacy back to earth. She takes a character who is mostly an idea, a conceit -- a person for whom pretending is more real than reality -- and invests her with poignancy and pride. In spirit Lettice is a one-woman show. But Smith gets splendid support from Margaret Tyzack in the thankless, stereotypical role of her clumping comrade Lotte Schoen and obliquely from Britain's Prince Charles, whose marginally less dotty tirades against contemporary architecture render Lettice's eccentricities almost trendy...
...were sopranos Grace Bumbry (Cassandra) and Shirley Verrett (Dido) and drew from it a sensitive reading of Berlioz's sprawling score. Bumbry was in good voice; Verrett was not; and the other singers tended to be ciphers. But Chung welded them and a surprisingly good chorus together into a splendid ensemble...
...Their Youth by Eileen Simpson (1982). This would be a rarity in any era, a literary memoir free of rancor and score settling. The author recalls her first husband, John Berryman, and his friends, among them Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell and Delmore Schwartz, men who left behind some splendid poems and some sad histories of alcoholism, despair and suicide. But here they are young and joyful amid the possibilities of words, ignorant of the sadnesses that await them...