Word: woe
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...York City Opera's opening production of Handel's Julius Caesar last week was just minutes old when Contralto Maureen Forrester fixed hand to forehead, shuddered "Woe unto me," and fainted dead away. Contralto roles are like that, full of weeping and despair, the tragic counterweights that support the romantic leads. Forrester, making her U.S. operatic debut, flawlessly performed the role of Cornelia, effortlessly pouring out great billows of plum-shaded singing that served as a lush backdrop for the vocal scrollwork of the other principal singers. Where they thrilled, she caressed. Predictably, the heaviest applause went...
Within limits, designs vary as widely as money and imagination can make them, and woe betide the skipper of a skow...
...Woe in Rio. The matches began fortnight ago with 16 national teams in the running. By late last week, the only teams with a hope of victory were Britain, Portugal, the Soviet Union and West Germany. To the despair of their supporters, the others had fallen to noisy defeat. The loudest wails came from Brazil, whose team had won the cup in 1958 and 1962. A loss to Portugal became a nationwide calamity. From office buildings in Rio and São Paulo, clouds of black carbon paper and typewriter ribbon cascaded onto the streets below; flags were lowered...
Housing's chief woe, of course, is a shortage of mortgage money more severe than at any time in the past 30 years. It began when the Federal Reserve, to fight inflation, boosted the discount rate last December. It has rapidly worsened in recent weeks as commercial banks have bid up interest rates on savings, thereby luring huge deposits away from such major sources of mortgage loans as savings and loans and mutual-savings banks. For lack of funds, several savings banks in Massachusetts, a traditional source of housing loans for the capital-shy South and West, have stopped...
Dennison might have been able to salvage the play with incisive dialogue or characterization. Instead he lets the hobos--philosophers, the mistress of ceremonies calls them--mumble some chit-chat about death and human woe. Sometimes they paraphrase the Bible ("Man is dust--that's the main thing"), and sometimes, like one of Beckett's characters, they talk of how it would be better not to have been born...