Word: librettos
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...least rewarding is the first of the three, Silverman's Madame Adare. Using a libretto by Richard Foreman, his longtime collaborator, the composer has written a fantasy, or more precisely a phantasmagoria, about psychoanalysis and creativity. As the piece begins, Miss Adare, played by Soprano Carol Gutknecht, is seeing her psychiatrist Dr. Hoffman (Bass-Baritone Richard Cross). Her problem: she cannot make up her mind whether she wants to be an opera star or a movie star, and while she dallies, she cannot even make enough money to pay for her sessions. When Hoffman refuses to treat her again...
...libretto concerns a husband who becomes enamored of a swinging, unmarried friend of his wife's. Domesticity triumphs when the wife changes costumes, wigs and personalities to deflate the husband's romantic notions. Director Bliss Hebert wittily stages the action with an array of modish accouterments undreamed of by Schoenberg, including Visa cards and telephones with TV monitors; Maxine Willi Klein's sleek set looks like a sci-fi Better Homes and Gardens; and the cast, especially Soprano Mary Shearer as the wife, delivers a slyly spirited performance. Slight as it is, this is the kind...
...actors happen to have a bad night when the graders come, that won't affect my grade. What really counts for my thesis is what's written--the score and libretto," Fletcher explains...
...Germany in 1933, the place and period of Grey's enormously successful Cabaret. Silverlake's theme, the venal rich vs. the virtuous poor, was so politically powerful in 1933 that Nazi storm troopers broke up performances. New York critics were not that harsh, but some deemed the libretto dated and the music not worth Weill. Still, uptown was heady for Grey. In lieu of Broadway's traditional "break a leg" opening night messages, a telegram from Met Tenor Placido Domingo invoked an ancient Jewish Spitzpah. "Ptui, ptui, ptui," it said, "on your operatic debut...
...traced to The Dark Side of the Moon and even past that, to the band's early days on the psychedelic front lines. To fans, this continuity must be just as reassuring as the trendiness Waters has grafted onto his lyrics, which are a kind of libretto for Me-decade narcissism. Says Tom Morrera, disc jockey at New York City's pacesetting WNEW-FM: "The Floyd are not as spacy as they used to be. They're doing art for art's sake, and you don't have to be high to get it. They...