Word: librettos
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...sense of disjointedness in the production grows as, halfway through Act I, some of the singers switch from the nicely intelligible English translation back to the German libretto. From then on, this is a bilingual performance--and if some scheme is being followed to determine when the singers switch from English to German, it's a well-kept secret. Perhaps they were flipping coins. By the middle of the second act, the show's pace has slowed to a crawl, the scene changes are lengthy, and the production which began in an explosion of striking images and ideas subsides into...
...unconventional touchs give this neatly traditional pageant a sort of down-home sweetness: the converted dining-hall dais with painted flats--a far cry from the classically cavernous operatic stage--and the idiosyncratic English of the translated libretto...
...libretto, adapted by stage director J. Scott Brumit, offers a good gauge of the show's tone, which teeters between the stylized and the awkwardly colloquial. "Ah, Adina," sighs Nemorino, the rejected farmboy. "Why, why must it be this way?" and she answers. "What a question...
...SINGERS HAVE more trouble with the dramatic control demanded by an English libretto. Operatic music with intelligible words is disconcerting enough to require a great deal of concentration, especially as the words are usually so silly, and only Brumit as Dulcamara is at ease enough with the intricacies of the diction to maintain a strong dramatic presence...
...masterpiece on this bill, an exquisitely orchestrated work full of both lyricism and humor, is L 'Enfant et les Sortilèges (literally The Child and the Sorceries). Colette wrote the libretto, a serenely wise fantasy about a child's guilt after a temper tantrum. When L'Enfant was first produced in 1925, George Balanchine, then 21, provided the incidental choreography. But noble lineage does not burden this opera in the way that it does Satie's Parade, probably because it offers ample possibilities for different interpretations. The little boy (played by Mezzo-Soprano Hilda Harris...