Word: superbeings
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Last week's performance was superb, with Soprano Price handling her warm and lustrous voice impeccably, and infusing the figure of Minnie with a believable passion that might have surprised even Playwright Belasco. Tenor Richard Tucker did an admirable job as Dick Johnson, the silliest role in the opera, and Baritone Anselmo Colzani, the only Italian among the principal characters, swashbuckled through the role of the sheriff like a refugee from Gunsmoke. And although the opera provided few memorable arias (one striking exception: Johnson's "Ch'ella mi creda libero"), it had a score full of surgingly...
...world draining away" in an emptied bottle of wine, despairing as he cries out for a Judas to betray him, collapsing in lip-quivering terror in the face of death. Producer Susskind surrounded Olivier with a supporting cast almost incredible in its depth. George C. Scott was superb as the police lieutenant who destroys his victim with cold intelligence and sympathetic understanding rather than simple brutality. As the slatternly mother of the priest's child, Julie Harris avoided the stylized ingenuousness that has almost become her trademark. Roddy McDowall was the subtle Judas in peon's tags...
...avoid arrest by the provisional government), Aurora (after the cruiser that fired on the Winter Palace), and the finale. Dawn of Mankind. The symphony avoids the dark colors and heavy textures of traditional Russian orchestral music; it recalls far better works in its sharply staccato rhythms and in the superb ingenuity of some of its string sequences. But not even as fine a technician as Shostakovich could conceal the general banality...
Horror & Hilarity. This kind of magnificent illogic whips like a mistral all through the novel, blowing both sequence and motivation into a rubble of farcical shocks and grisly surprises. Catch-22 is held together only by the inescapable fact that Joseph Heller is a superb describer of people and things. Take his portrait of a character called Hungry Joe: "A jumpy, emaciated wretch with a fleshless face of dingy skin and bone and twitching veins squirming subcutaneously in the blackened hollows behind his eyes like severed sections of snake. Hungry Joe ate voraciously, gnawed incessantly at the tips...
...acting is generally good and in some cases superb. Countess Elesca is portrayed by an obscure actress who nevertheless does a remarkable job. She carries herself with the dignity of one enlightened through suffering, and in her periods of involuntary evil follows her unconquerable instincts with grisly resolution. She also achieves outstanding expressiveness with simple movements; merely sitting up slowly in her coffin at sunset she moves the viewer greatly...