Word: stagecraft
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...their faith from the same sources. Yet from the time of the Muslim conquests and the Crusades, West and Islam have confronted each other by turns in attitudes of incomprehension, greed, fanaticism, prurient interest, fear and loathing. The drama has lost none of its historic tension in the stagecraft of the Ayatullah Khomeini. "This is not a struggle between the United States and Iran," he has told the faithful. "It is a struggle between Islam and the infidel." At such moments, the Imam takes on the wild and grainy aspect of a dire Mohammedan prophet by DeMille...
...insights working in her husband John Y. Brown's campaign for the governorship of Kentucky. Now that the national presidential campaigns are lurching out of various closets and back rooms, everybody will get a chance to sample and even overdose on that admixture of reality and stagecraft that politics has become...
...purists this approach is sheer heresy--they remember Wagner's demand that his works be called "music-dramas." But most scoff at that today, and take the music much more seriously than the drama. Sellars does the opposite, and compensates for the loss in musical clarity with wonderfully adroit stagecraft. Sometimes it descends to the level of slapstick pot-shots at Wagner's Nibelungs, Gibichungs, forest-birds and bears, but at least as often it sensibly comments on the eternal production problems of the Ring...
Soprano Teresa Stratas had to rely more on temperament and stagecraft than on an overtaxed voice, especially in the punishing higher reaches of Berg's writing. But her Lulu was sexy and mercurial, as much the victim as the exploiter of her powers. She was superbly matched by Baritone Franz Mazura's richly shaded portrayal of the newspaper magnate Dr. Schön, Lulu's patron and eventual husband. The rest of the cast was excellent too: Tenor Robert Tear as a naive painter undone by Lulu, and Bass-Baritone Toni Blankenheim as the mysterious Schigolch, Lulu...
Stigwood plans to bring Evita to Broadway next year, where its London reception is not likely to be repeated. New Yorkers, who only this season have seen Prince's On the Twentieth Century, may not go quite so gaga over the lavish stagecraft of Evita. The Webber-Rice score, an immediate hit in England when released as a double album in 1976, has failed to catch on in the States. Still, all is not necessarily lost. If Stigwood can only find a way to package the show that is playing outside the Prince Edward Theater instead...