Word: version
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Arthur Miller looked positively giddy as 3,500 Chicagoans stood up and yelled at him. No, it wasn't a riot, but the final curtain call at this month's world premiere of A View from the Bridge, William Bolcom's operatic version of Miller's 1955 play about love and death on the Brooklyn waterfront. The Lyric Opera of Chicago bet big on Bolcom, giving his American-style grand opera a production worthy of Aida, and the horse paid off: View packs the theatrical punch of a double boilermaker...
...Puccini's La Boheme and Leoncavallo's Pagliacci. Sure enough, the tale of Eddie Carbone (baritone Kim Josephson), a middle-aged longshoreman who lusts after his young niece Catherine (soprano Juliana Rambaldi), has verismo stamped all over it, right down to the climactic knife fight. In this new version, adapted by Miller and co-librettist Arnold Weinstein, View has acquired a Greek chorus that comments on the unfolding disaster, though the overall effect remains faithful to the original play. Think of West Side Story, only with the kids grown up--and angrier...
...while View is sprinkled with pop (including a doo-wop quartet and a Puccinified version of Paper Doll), Bolcom has succeeded in smelting many disparate styles into a tightly unified idiom all his own. There are times when the openhearted lyricism of a Leonard Bernstein would have been welcome, but the lean, laconic score keeps the action moving, lending Miller's kitchen-table naturalism a freshening touch of poetry. Add in Josephson's star-quality performance as Eddie, the exemplary staging of Frank Galati (who directed Broadway's Ragtime) and Santo Loquasto's angular set--the Brooklyn Bridge as painted...
...control and the main character found redemption with a woman in a familial relationship. She called the movie "Stiffed on speed," so I called Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote the novel Fight Club. He was several hundred pages deep into Faludi's book and already calling his story "the fictionalized version of Stiffed." There was a lot of love going around...
...portal when you can build your own? Internet incubator CMGI will unveil a beefed-up version of its AltaVista search engine today. Promotion spending for the next nine months is budgeted at $120 million, $8 million of which will be spent today. That's a lot of money, for sure, but it's still much cheaper than getting a portal on the open market. Yahoo wanna-be Lycos, another big CMGI investment, is currently worth $5 billion now, with the real Yahoo currently trading at nearly nine times that figure...