Word: vegas
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Today, most people tend to think of American folk music in terms of simplicity, humble unadulterated vocals, simple guitar parts and hole-in-the-wall coffeehouses. Stardom inevitably means crossing over into pop music, a la Tracy Chapman, Suzanne Vega and Michelle Shocked. And for the most fortunate and gifted, there comes the chance to perform on Sinatra's Duets album. What is generally unknown is that the long tradition of American folk instrumentalists remains well alive, albeit largely in obscurity. Out of the bluegrass and other string band music that flourished in rural America, came a national folk music...
Fuente Ovejuna. A 1600's Spanish dramaby Lope de Vega and translated and adapted byAdrian Mitchell. The true story of a small town infifteenth-century Spain whose peasant citizens, inorder to defend their honor and rights ascitizens, are led by a townswoman to rise upagainst their tyrannous commander. Loeb DramaCenter, 8 p.m. $5 for students...
...cliche contends that the Spanish are a proud and passionate people; Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna hardly strives to dispel the stereotype. After a spot of flogging and rape foreplay, loopy Lope really gets the juices flowing with graphic onstage torture and decapitation. Gorier than "Commando," racier than "Emmanuelle on Taboo Island," Fuente Ovejuna makes for old-fashioned family fun. Yet for all its mainstage status, its interesting script and its many strengths, the Loeb production retains on overwhelming air of student drama of the cardboard shield and plastic sword school...
Written in the first years of the 17th century, Fuente Ovejuna stuns the audience with its precocity. Lope de Vega pokes fun at P.C. euphemisms, impractical intellectuals, outmoded patriarchal feudalism and classist snobbery. He addresses what we though were 19th and 20th century causes celebres: social revisionism, empowerment of the masses, demogoguery, mob violence and group identity. Furthermore, his plot simultaneously explores the development of the nation-state in Spain, and its effects at an individual level. Lope de Vega's mature, witty, gutsy script presents these topics engagingly...
Dramatic crackerjack that it is, Fuente Ovejuna still lands its director in all sorts of difficulties. Lope de Vega sticks to the courtly writing conventions of his day: his shepherds display admirable eloquence, intellectual curiosity and a penchant for Socratic dialogue; his washerwomen have quicker wits and sharper tongues than Oscar Wilde, and all his characters indulge a fondness for spontaneous poetry in the throes of battle, rape and torture. Nor did the author subscribe to total proletarian emancipation: Subcurrents of aristocratic patronage and the social contract irk modern-day viewers. And the script deserves to be adopted...