Word: desdemona
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...thespian's usually large share of bravado, but he is also full of Shakespeare and good humor. One of the highlights of the show comes when McKellen challenges the audience to find a single happy marriage in Shakespeare's canon--and shoots down every suggestion--from Othello and Desdemona to Brutus and Portia--with a few witty retorts. "Romeo and Juliet?" McKellen muses, "Short and sweet...
...bother to film Verdi's Otello if you are going to omit its most famous aria, the haunting Willow Song, thus reducing Desdemona to a walk-on? Director Franco Zeffirelli never quite answers that question. The flamboyant Italian's 1983 cinematic version of La Traviata widened the opera's scope with tender reminiscences only implied in the libretto. In Otello, however, flashbacks to the Moor's slave childhood are maudlin, and Zeffirelli's camera, jumping edgily from storm to massed choruses to brawls and bedrooms, tires the mind. As Otello, Tenor Placido Domingo is in robust voice, and Bass Justino...
...real-life geishas seeking to refine their feminine ways. "To act as an onnagata, "he says, "is to try to create an ideal; what I as a man would consider to be the ideal woman." Bando has also done non-Kabuki work, including heralded performances as Lady Macbeth and Desdemona. But his dream role was created by Tennessee Williams in A Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche DuBois, of course...
...fall of 1981 she had been acting almost without a break since 1977. At 24 she had made nine movies, had played commedia dell'arte and Polish romantic stage literature for the Drama Theater, and had just finished taking the part of Desdemona in a TV production of Othello. She was at the top of her profession in a country where theater is taken seriously...
...certainly, she says. There would be no problem at all. But the production of Othello, in which she played Desdemona before she left, still has not been shown on Polish television. Do the authorities resent what she insists is not a defection...