Word: desdemonas
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...success, and Pavarotti (who munched on pieces of apple during the choruses to keep his throat clear) sang an inspired Otello. This is what comes across on the CD: From the Esultate which marks his entry in the storm-tossed first act to his dying embrace of the martyred Desdemona, Pavarotti sings with the passion of the warrior who boils with jealousy. His lyrical voice is audibly more at ease in passages such as the love duet at the end of the first act, but he doesn't shrink from the over-bearing machismo that, in Otello, explodes at various...
...Kanawa is an appropriately ingenuous Desdemona and sustains the first half of the last act beautifully with the "Willow Song" and the Ave Maria. Although her performance doesn't mesh entirely with Pavarotti's careful reading of his role (especially in the first-act love duet, which comes across more as two parallel soliloquies), her characterization is admirable, and she comes into her own in the second-act scene where she is admired by the chorus of men, women and children...
...second half of this play is more structured. Woolf speaks mainly on the theme of Women and Fiction. Why are there so many strong and willful women in the fiction of ages past (Lady Macbeth, Anna Karenina and Desdemona among them) and so few in real life? What happened to writers like Jane Austen who did not have money and a room of their own? How did it suddenly become respectable for women to earn money by their pens...
...only real change in the text--the conversion of the Duke of Venice to the Duchess of Venice--is a cutesy, annoying attempt at originality. Emilia's "ills that we do" speech to Desdemona in Act IV, scene 4, explains that men wield all the power in the play. More than simple cross-casting, Williams' decision is a script revision that helps to undermine the strength of Othello's clear and present gender tensions...
...production is not without its merits. Tom Chick provides a creative, exciting interpretation of Cassio as a befuddled yet well-intentioned swash-buckler. Nell Benjamin creates an attractive and spirited Desdemona, and John Haddon, with his rich accent and beautiful eloqution, is occasionally poetic in delivering Lodovico's lines...