Word: tragically
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...production and directorial staff deserve sympathy on this account: the opera's plot is gushy and melodramatic in a way that transcends even the often sappy plots of Romantic and Classical opera. A family tries to regroup after the tragic (drunk driving) death of a mother. Daughter Susie, son Junior and Francoise, who is Susie's husband and Junior's former lover, return for the funeral and try to heal various painful wounds from the past. This is the stuff not of musical opera, but of soap opera...
Though it takes for its subject one of jazz's great tragic figures, Yesterdays is not concerned with scaling the heights of Holiday's mythic stature, nor with undoing it. Rather, it engages its audience in discovering Holliday's life through her own music and that of others. Like a great jazz composition, Yesterdays hovers about its theme without suffocating it, evades static and predetermined theatrical structures, defies classification and resists resolution...
Holiday returns to relate the tragic story behind her composition "Strange Fruit," but she cannot bear to perform it. Cochrane provides one of the most moving moments of the evening when he unexpectedly performs the work in Holiday's place, further undoing distinctions between performance and production, drama and musical concert. Cochrane's solemn sound, raspy and bellowing, is ideally suited to the mournful tune...
...rescued. Among them is the title character, Kim, a peasant virgin turned bar girl turned soldier's wife-to-be, forlornly waving the now useless paper that says she is entitled to join the soldier far away. That moment shapes Kim's life and drives the story toward its tragic reunion. When at last she sees the father of her toddler son, he is married to another woman. In a desperate moment, Kim does the only thing she can think of to force the father to take his son to the U.S. With her suicide, a story that has been...
...continuation of any racial or ethnic stereotype contributes to prejudice and insensitivity. Moreover, this specific stereotype belittles the tragic problem of alcoholism, which plagues hundreds of thousands of people and their families...