Word: librettist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Handel and Haydn Society, under the direction of Christopher Hogwood, presented the second of two performances of their season opener, Handel's L'Allegro, Il Penseroso ed Il Moderato. This 1740 work combines excerpts from two Milton poems, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, with original poetry by Handel's librettist Charles Jennens, the Il Moderato, set to what is essentially orchestral accompaniment...
...only so many times you can do The Sound of Music," McConnell says. "At the festival we show how to develop a successful musical without the Broadway imprimatur." Last year Alliance theaters mounted 44 productions of new musicals. "The only hope of getting something done on Broadway," says veteran librettist Joe Masteroff (Cabaret, She Loves Me), "is to have it produced first in regional theaters. The festival is a chance to have all the regional people see it at once...
Robbins quickly found himself some inspired collaborators: composer Leonard Bernstein and scenarist Arthur Laurents (Stephen Sondheim, in his first major musical credit, joined as librettist later). There were some stumbles: originally the pavement warriors were Jews and Catholics, but that reminded Laurents too much of Abie's Irish Rose. Puerto Ricans, who moved to New York City in great numbers after World War II, became the antagonists, squaring off against a gang of melting-pot whites...
...Klinghoffer, both set to elegant, literate librettos by poet Alice Goodman, tackled explosive subjects in unconventional ways. Nixon presented a surprisingly intimate, sympathetic portrait of the former President, while Klinghoffer roused the ire of some American Jews with its compassionate presentation of Palestinian suffering. Jordan, the team's new librettist, is a political activist whose lapidary vernacular libretto uses a catastrophic Los Angeles earthquake as a metaphor for the shattering power of love...
Sellars, 37, is the former wunderkind director who brought composer John Adams and librettist Alice Goodman together for Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1991). He is known for his unconventional settings of operas and plays: he set Mozart's Don Giovanni in Spanish Harlem, and only last year he moved The Merchant of Venice to Venice, California, just down the beach from Malibu. Always a skillful director of actors and stage movement, Sellars has often seemed capricious in his grand recontextualizations. But in this case, he has created a modern setting that is ingeniously...