Word: librettist
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...that it has been fashioned out of what would seem to be very awkward, complex material. Corigliano was interested in a story that would include the characters from The Marriage of Figaro as they appear 20 years later in Beaumarchais's play La Mere Coupable. He asked his librettist, William Hoffman, "to create a libretto that did not set me in 1792 but set me in a world of smoke and haze from which I could look into the past, leap into or out of the past...
...trouble with the queen's change of heart is that it is never made convincing dramatically. That leaves soprano Teresa Stratas, emotionally eloquent as ever and in superb voice, with very little to do beyond expressing continual anguish. While librettist Hoffman does well portraying the sexual jealousy of the Almavivas and the connubial loyalty of Figaro and Susanna, his lead couple remain elusive...
Loesser's output as a Hollywood songwriter, in the years before the composer-lyricist-librettist ganged up on Broadway, needs no revival. It already ornaments every TV late show. Loesser's catchy titles and skewed wit helped lodge many a song in the musical muscle memory of anyone who loves vintage pop: Heart and Soul and Two Sleepy People (music by Hoagy Carmichael), I Don't Want to Walk Without You (Jule Styne), Jingle Jangle Jingle (Joseph Lilley), Hoop-Dee-Doo (Milton DeLugg). And when Loesser began marrying his own music to his words, he hatched even more smashes: What...
...nearly unprecedented role of composer, lyricist and librettist for a Broadway show, Loesser adapted Sidney Howard's 1924 play They Knew What They Wanted, the story of a naive Italian-American grape grower who tricks a pretty waitress into marriage. The result, after five years' work, was The Most Happy Fella, a rich and deeply felt pastiche of popular and operatic vocabularies. If none of its 40-plus songs have quite the lasting power of Guys and Dolls' tunes, the show has an emotive force rare on Broadway; the feeling is big enough to fill an opera stage...
...Producer Heidi Landesman also designed the allegorical, imagistic set, based on a child's toy theater. Director Susan Schulman has laced the narrative with ghosts and wraiths of memory. Composer Lucy Simon blended folk music apt to the Yorkshire locale with art songs fitting the moneyed manor-house setting. Librettist-lyricist Marsha Norman solved the self-containment of the three main characters by making their songs vehicles for thoughts they would never merely speak. Although the creators stress their sensitivity to the book's fans, they were not revisiting childhood pleasures of their own; most remembered the book dimly...