Word: buffo
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...glint of extravagant humor in the recital of the Don's conquests by his servant Leporello, with the list stretching down the steps of his house and out into the garden; but José Van Dam's engaging Leporello is scarcely allowed to become the buffo scalawag that Mozart and Da Ponte had in mind. Edda Moser as Donna Anna, Teresa Berganza as Zerlina, Kenneth Riegel as Don Ottavio, all throw themselves into their roles with intensity, but only the exotic Kiri Te Kanawa, as Donna Elvira, manages to shake off some of Losey's heavy seriousness...
...everything but his costly cotton undershorts; his old friend Thaxter, an eccentric literary conman with expensive tastes, has squandered thousands of Citrine's dollars given to start an intellectual quarterly. In addition, Citrine's silver-gray Mercedes has been vandalized by a petty hood, a Mafia buffo character named Ronald Cantabile, to whom Citrine unwittingly gave a bad check in payment for a minor gambling debt...
...people-who have managed to avoid being bitten by the opera bug and to whom the prospect of an evening at the Met is highly resistible. The shows cut down two Italian comic operas to half-hour nibbles, a drastic reducing plan that is still adequate for the skinny buffo plots. Sutherland trots out for a bow and a chat with the puppets and explains the story to them ("I have a bit of money, and he wants to marry me himself," she says, introducing Rossini's Barber of Seville). Then off she goes to act out key scenes...
Died. Salvatore Baccaloni, 69, basso buffo of the Metropolitan Opera from 1940 to 1962; of heart disease; in Manhattan. His keen sense of timing, his magnificent voice and even grander physique (320 lbs.) gained Baccaloni a reputation as "the greatest scene stealer in the business." Toscanini discovered him in Italy in 1925, and the young giant packed houses around the world before coming to the Met to appear in such roles as Don Pasquale, Doctor Bartolo and Fra Melitone...
...play, hissing the villain or the ranting hypocrite, singing "God Save the King," applauding patriotic aphorisms dropped by the hero, and sighing with the heroine as she coughs bravely into a handkerchief--a la Camille. In the second act, however, the cooperation changed to hostility, and even a superbly buffo fight could not rouse interest. A good period piece Sweeney Todd undeniably is, but who reads Henry Esmond for pleasure any more...