Word: sweeney
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Enter, at last, Lysistrata (Kathleen Sweeney) and her horde of woman cohorts: Kalonike (Darla Christopher), Myrrhine (Nancy Boghossian), Lampito (Sarah Brown), Ismenia (Maureen Fallon) and Calipo (Chuck Marshall). Yes, that was Chuck. A male playing a female part--there must be something behind this. You keep waiting for him to reveal his identity and perhaps foil Lysistrata's master plan. When it becomes apparent that nothing of the sort is going to happen, you begin to wonder if enough women auditioned. But no, the director tells you afterwards, they thought it would be a good joke...
...virus is beginning to infect the Broadway musical and its name is opera. Last season's Sweeney Todd strained to achieve operatic style with recitatives and songs structured like arias; this season's Evita dispenses entirely with spoken dialogue...
Harold Prince directs with pile-driving force and thereby sacrifices the characters' personal emotions to visual and aural dynamics. If, as in Sweeney Todd, he has tossed away the key to the human heart, he is a master strategist of the stage. He deploys his acting troupes with brilliant precision at a crackling tempo. It is Prince, aided by a huge gray screen whose cyclopean eye brims with historic film clips, who hurls the dramatic thunderbolts of the evening. In two scenes of mass turbulence, with banners flying and the crowd in a hypnotic roar...
...Sweeney Todd. Not for the squeamish, since it is about cutting people's throats, baking the fresh cadavers without delay and serving them up as meat pies. With Angela Lansbury and Len Cariou in peak performances, Sweeney Todd is a classic example of the remarkable virtuosity and range of the U.S. musical when it is in the hands of two flamboy ant masters of the stage, Director Harold Prince and Composer-Lyricist Stephen Sondheim. It is also the closest Sondheim has come to writing an opera, albeit dark, cynical and morbid...
Apart from Sweeney Todd, this Broadway season has been a musical bone yard Uttered with seemingly logical decisions. It must have seemed logical to cast Liv Ullmann as the indomitable mother of a struggling Norwegian immigrant brood. Unfortunately, the only thing she gets right is her accent. Ullmann is no singer, and she croaks out her numbers with nary a trace of that speechifying grace that Rex Harrison brought to My Fair Lady. With her disconcertingly low voice and brisk delivery, it sometimes seems as if she is barking out orders, like some displaced storm trooper...