Word: steinbeck
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...missing a hoofbeat or a paycheck, he appears in westerns (Jesse James), biographies (The Story of Alexander Graham Bell), even comedies (The Mad Miss Manton). But it is not until 1940 that the man and his role fuse into the permanence of art. More than 20 years later, John Steinbeck unreels a print of The Grapes of Wrath...
...Times pass and we change; the urgency departs and this is called dating," Steinbeck says. "But I did thread the thing on my home projector and sat back to weather it out. Then a lean, stringy, dark-faced piece of electricity walked out on the screen, and he had me. I believed my own story again. It was fresh and happening and good...
...Susannah "and the elders. Thereafter, he reached higher and sagged lower. Emily Brontë's Withering Heights (1958) and the Civil War Reconstruction story of The Passion of Jonathan Wade (1962) demanded largeness, even grandiloquence. Floyd's talent lay in revealing smaller situations, personal relationships. Since John Steinbeck's interests were in much the same area, Floyd's selection of Of Mice and Men is a perceptive return to the type of work that made Susannah seem a one-shot success...
Floyd has fleshed out the bleak Steinbeck characters, revealed the loneliness and longing behind their failure, and given them music that raises their foolishness, vanity and ambition to the level of high tragedy. The music is extraordinarily singable; its effect is that of glowingly lyrical, somewhat familiar music that one has never heard before. Floyd's libretto transforms Steinbeck's tragic tale of a misunderstood simpleton into a threnody for lost men haunted by a dream-in this case, the dream of a farm of their own. Sings George...
...enthusiasm. They called for Composer Floyd and for Director Frank Corsaro. With Baritone Julian Patrick as George, Tenor Robert Moulson as the doomed half-wit Lennie, and Soprano Carol Bayard as the ranch-house temptress who teases Lennie once too often, Of Mice and Men seems uniquely American. Like Steinbeck's depression-depressed characters, Floyd's opera has calluses on its hands and hot blood in its heart. It will probably be around a long time...