Word: wagnerities
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Sound familiar? There are suggestions of Brunnhilde's dilemma here, and certainly Lohengrin's. These similarities would not much matter if the music had independent life. Instead, the score is a shameless pastiche, something that Erich Korngold, the peerless artificer of movie music, would have deeply appreciated. Wagner (including an outright steal of Tristan's theme for Roland), Meyerbeer, Offenbach, all emerge from the pit. The vocal music is lifted mostly from Berlioz, who wrote wonderfully sensuous love duets. The pity is that in Manon, Massenet created an ineffable erotic style...
...sure, NBC had spun Angie Dickinson's Police Woman out of its Police Story series two years ago and had done reasonably well with a show that portrayed a woman as brave and self-reliant. Then, of course, there was The Bionic Woman, starring Lindsay Wagner. Silverman ordered her resurrected after she was erroneously bumped off at the end of a special appearance on The Six Million Dollar Man; a heart and a rather engaging spirit coexist with the electronic circuitry under Lindsay's lovely skin. The fact that The Bionic Woman consistently rates...
Neither Bionic Woman Lindsay Wagner nor Wonder Woman Lynda Carter has, obviously, the mature appeal of an Angie Dickinson. But Los Angeles-born Wagner, who did a couple of low-budget features (notably Paper Chase), has potential. The show's creator, Ken Johnson, says he modeled her character after an ideal date he had in mind, someone "truthful, witty and eminently attractive," and Wagner seems to fill the bill. Says Wagner: "I'm trying like hell not to be Wonder Woman." Carter, 24, who is trying like hell to put that character across, is a former swimming champion...
...routine for O'Neil, 28, who also blithely falls off buildings, gets roughed up in fight scenes and tumbles from speeding cars on Quincy, Gemini Man and Baretta, among other television shows. Doubling for a villain on the Bionic Woman, she speeds neck and neck with Lindsay Wagner in a dune-buggy chase before losing spectacularly in a sandy somersault. In Airport 77, a recycled crash caper, she torpedoes through the high waters of a flooding aircraft cabin to rescue a small...
...ready to put on Gluck's landmark opera Orfeo and Euridice, 18th century male-chauvinist Parisians balked at having a male contralto play the hero, considering that an affront to their manhood; poor Gluck had to rewrite the part for tenor. In the 19th century, even a Wagner or a Verdi had to include a ballet in his opera or risk not getting it performed in Paris. In more recent times, the price of government subsidization included requirements that more than 50% of the repertory be French and that French singers be given priority. So mediocre did the Paris...