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Dates: during 1960-1960
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...FitzGibbon's Decline and Fall of the British Empire. With horrid persuasiveness, it looks forward to the moment, somewhere between 1960 and 1984, when Britain decides "to commit suicide" and becomes a Soviet satellite. Lest any reader think he is not reading about the possible, FitzGibbon provides a text from Lenin, who held that in war, it is best to wait "until the moral disintegration of the enemy renders the mortal blow both possible and easy...
...Society, supported by the Festival Orchestra, devoted its concert, under the direction of Allen Lannom, to two major works: Vaughan Williams' Dona Nobis Pacem, and Orff's Carmina Burana. Acting on his premonition of World War II, Vaughan Williams wrote his cantata in 1936, in which he fashioned his text from a phrase of the Roman Mass, sizable excerpts from Walt Whitman (who is full of superlative choral texts), and bits from John Bright and the Bible. Composed with a knowing hand, it lacked only vitality in performance...
Three evenings were given over to performances of Vittorio Giannini's comic opera The Taming of the Shrew. Composed in 1953, it proved to be one of the finest operas yet written by a native American. The libretto uses only words from Shakespeare: the text of Shrew, a speech from Romeo and Juliet, and some lines from the Sonnets. Unlike the Cole Porter musical comedy version of the play, Kiss Me, Kate, Giannini has given equal weight to the two pairs of lovers in the original tale--Katherina and Petruchio, Bianca and Lucentio. The result is a highly dramatic...
...felicitous words, "Any set of symbols, moved close to this play, lights up as in an electric field." Whatever else it may be, the play is a masterful study of the use and abuse of liberty (how often the very words "liberty," "free" and "freedom" crop up in the text...
Only two important shortcomings characterize this production. The first is the total excision of the first scene, which gives the play its title--doubly inexcusable since the text of the play is, except for The Comedy of Errors, the shortest in the entire canon. The second is the lack-luster playing of the king and his companions (save Richard Waring's well-spoken Antonio), of whom Loring Smith's Alonzo and O. Z. Whitehead's Sebastian are embarrassingly inept. Still, the show is a striking success for William Ball in his directorial debut for the Festival...