Word: viceroy
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With his first two books, English Author Bruce Chatwin revealed a flair for the exotic and unexpected. In Patagonia (1978) conducted a guided tour through a remote, forlorn region of South America. The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980) took an imaginative leap in time and space back to the flourishing days of the West African slave trade. Given these performances and the critical praise they received, Chatwin's third book (and second novel) seems more surprising still. On the Black Hill has nothing at all to do with wanderlust or faraway places; it is as firmly rooted to one spot...
...Harvard students. Margery Hellmold '83, who will star in Gilbert & Sullivan's The Gondoliers next month, brings her beautiful, seemingly effortless soprano to the title role. She plays one half of a pair of street singers in Peru and is lured away from her partner Piquillo, by the Viceroy, played by Dominic A.A. Randolph '84. Through a series of Contrivances, she is married to Piquillo without Piquillo's knowledge. Piquillo later discovers the secret but then comes to believe that La Perichole is the Viceroy's mistress; her task is to convince her partner that she has loved...
Randolph's Viceroy is more of a match for La Perichole than Piquillo is. His resonant baritone has an edge to it that makes it stand out even in the large chorus members. Randolph's speaking voice, a natural British accent dulled somewhat by his moving to New Jersey, seems a bit odd in a story that takes place in Peru. Likewise, the sets, colorful but subtle hues that provide a good background for the sometimes intentionally garish costumes, look very little like anything in any Latin American country that I've ever seen. But this is opera; we shouldn...
...each new ecological niche is opened by the fall of an old species or the rise of a new environment, creatures will fill it by trial and error. Some will survive by preying on others. Some will protect themselves by mimicking other species (like today's Viceroy butterfly, which birds avoid because it looks just like the foul-tasting Monarch). Some will simply reproduce faster than their competitors...
Bruce Chatwin sidled into the limelight two years ago with In Patagonia, a stylish piece of travel writing. The Viceroy of Ouidah finds his jeweler's eye playing over 19th century West Africa. The book is a novelization of the life and death of a footloose Brazilian named Francisco Felix de Souza, who flourished as a slave trader under the protection of the King of Dahomey. Chatwin began his research nine years ago in Dahomey and returned in 1977 to find the country named the People's Republic of Benin. "The fetish priests of Ouidah," he notes...