Word: virago
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...hurry. To create "sensuality on the stage corresponding to that of the music," Festival Director Menotti charted swirls of fluid movement and replaced the traditional austerity of Wagnerian scenery with velvet, flowers and drawing-room furniture. Menotti was also convinced that "when an Isolde looks like a virago and Tristan looks like a Swedish masseur, the love scenes risk becoming grotesque, even comical." So he filled the leading roles with two American singers who were stunningly typecast. Isolde, Soprano Klara Barlow, 38, exhibited the leggy (5 ft. 11 in.), platinum-blonde beauty of a former chorus girl -which...
...Scene: Wives of the crew members of Vallone's newest ship, the S.S. Phaedra, standing mutely in the corridor outside his office to await news of the shipwreck that has killed most of their husbands. The women are swathed in rusty black, and Mercouri, a vengeful virago in white silk, elbows her way savagely through the crowd as she seeks out Vallone to tell him that she and Perkins have been lovers...
King Sextimus (Jack Gilford) is a Harpo Marxist mute with whom no 15th century lady in waiting is more than half safe. Queen Agravaine (Jane White) is a jawing virago for whom possession is nine-tenths of motherhood's law. It begins to look as if their son, poor fretful Prince Dauntless (Joe Bova), will always be mama's boy. And then one day Princess Winnifred (Carol Burnett) swims the moat. Winnifred ("My friends call me 'Fred' ") rescues Dauntless from his possessive mother, but only after Fred's friends have built up the queen...
From the start, Hopital Trousseau "looked sinister"; the head nurse seemed like a heartless virago. Peggy was not allowed her "pretty, rose nightdress," instead got "a veritable sack." Under regulations barring money and jewels, she could not even keep her religious medal. "Pay for eight days," said the cashier. "If she doesn't last that long, you'll get the extra money back." On return visits, Micheline Vernhes had to wait outside the gates, often in the rain; Peggy sobbed hysterically each time her mother had to leave her alone after the brief visiting hours. After eight days...
...flood of good, bad and mediocre disks, there are some surprising disappointments. Siobhan McKenna's reading of Molly Bloom's sensuous soliloquy from James Joyce's Ulysses lacks both the virago drive and the Lilith languors of that Protean whore; Dame Peggy Ashcroft sounds too much the maidenly elocutionist for the passionate verses in her assorted Poetry Readings (London). London's Sherlock Holmes disk goes to the other extreme as three mighty hams-Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ralph Richardson. Orson Welles-rant and thunder through Dr. Watson Meets Sherlock Holmes and The Final Problem...