Word: librettist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sheet and beckoning for comfort, on the detective's flophouse bed; the sultry wife of a rich, infirm old man, who fibs as automatically as other people breathe; the detective's torch-singer ex-girlfriend, now reduced to offering more private entertainments; and a spooky guru bilking the faithful. Librettist Larry Gelbart cheerily exploits these cliches without sneering at the genre. In telling the Hollywood side of the story, however, he is at times as snide as in his just closed satire of Iran-contra, Mastergate. But when he becomes cranky about the writer's woeful lot, the show...
...Stuffed into a hamper of dirty laundry to escape a jealous husband, the portly knight gets ignominiously flung into the Thames. "Oh, oh, oh," he finally cries as the supposedly merry wives of Windsor burn him with their tapers. In setting this black comedy to music, Verdi and his librettist, Arrigo Boito, degrade the hero still further. "Lord, make him impotent," the women chorus as everyone flails and pummels the fallen hero. And yet after his punishment on the stage of the Brooklyn Academy of Music last week, a wonderful thing happened. Falstaff mysteriously rose above his tormentors and soared...
That did not happen for Legs Diamond. Despite five years of development, the show that previewed in late October was, in the blunt judgment of co-producer Arthur Rubin, "a disaster." Librettist Harvey Fierstein apologized to the audience at the first performance. Alluding to the practice of testing a show out of town, which Legs skipped because of its complex sets and lighting, Fierstein said, "Ladies and gentlemen, this is New Haven...
...result of all these costs, Carrie barely had carfare home after its Broadway opening night. There was no contingency plan, just a hope against hope for generosity from the critics. When that failed, Gore, Librettist Lawrence Cohen and Lyricist Dean Pitchford started shopping for emergency investors to create an instant reserve fund. Landesman pondered stepping in with more cash from Jujamcyn but in the end decided not to underwrite even one additional week's losses so the search for investors could go on. Explains Landesman: "I would have put up $500,000, but I didn't see the rest...
...inside themselves, except in a pair of oblique, cryptic solo songs. Director David H. Bell has let a number of solecisms slip past, including a raunchy Monkey Song about the secret lustfulness of women that is entertaining but out of character for the men of a traveling revival show. Librettist John Bishop links the story's religious excesses too closely to the economic travails of the 1930s. But in Casey Biggs and Sharon Scruggs as the saints turned sinners turned martyrs, this promising show has lead performers capable of competing with the vivid memory of the 1960 film. -- W.A.H...