Word: minis
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...French Composer Maurice Ghana's jagged, surrealistic chamber opera, Syllabaire pour Phèdre (1967), has found a stage. Together with Henry Purcell's well-known yet seldom performed 17th century opera Dido and Aeneas, Ghana's work last week inaugurated the Metropolitan Opera's Mini-Met-officially known as the Opera at the Forum...
...Mini-Met stage is one that many Girl Scout theater troupes might find modest. Housed beneath the Vivian Beaumont Theater in the Lincoln Center complex, the Forum is a tiny arena theater seating 280. There is no proscenium and no orchestra pit; the musicians, instrumentalists as well as chorus, must squeeze onto a narrow balcony suspended above the stage...
Despite the physical disadvantages, the company has assembled a trio of tightly meshed, highly polished productions. Mini-Met amply fulfills hopes that have been growing for nearly two decades. Early in his administration as the Met's general manager, Sir Rudolf Bing spoke of creating a second opera stage for intimate performances of small-scale works unsuited to a 3,800-seat house, with the dual purpose of providing young artists with wider exposure while attracting audiences not smitten with standard repertory. But lacking a convenient junior theater like Milan's 600-seat Piccolo Scala or Munich...
...Richard Dufallo and staged by Paul Emile-Deiber, alternating with a rollicking treatment of Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts, conducted by Roland Gagnon and superbly staged by Alvin Ailey. By sprinkling a few gilded names among the less familiar artists who will get exposure at Mini-Met, Chapin clearly hopes to attract subscribers from the parent company as well as tap a new and younger public. On opening night, for example, a gifted newcomer named Nancy Williams sang Phaedra, while Dido and Aeneas were handsomely dispatched by International Stars Evelyn Lear and Thomas Stewart. The audience...
...sort of mini-Dunkirk, fishing boats transported most of the island's inhabitants to the mainland, where buses took them into Reykjavik. Hospital patients and the elderly were rescued by small planes and helicopters, which braved intense heat and volcanic ash to land at an airstrip only 200 yds. from the eruption. Within 3½ hours, everyone on Heimaey had been evacuated. About 200 police, firemen and rescue workers stayed behind to salvage what they could of Vestmannaey-jar, the island's only town and Iceland's most important fishing center. Miraculously, there were no casualties...