stage matters
Seeing "Cats" again, as we did a few days ago, I was struck again by all the thoughts I'd had the first time around: it's not as awful as some of Weber's later stuff; mainly he's saved by T.S. Eliot's pitch-perfect, bouncy poetry; "Memory" is probably Weber's lasting contribution to the world of melody, simple and beautiful and not too cloying in the right hands; I'd love to hear some of this stuff done by real singers: Jessye Norman, perhaps, as Grizabella, and James Morris as Old Deuteronomy.
Liberated from the usual Broadway voice, some of that stuff is really cool. The other thought I had was that opera really needs to get kinetic. Time was that at least an hour of any given opera was solid ballet. Dance was taken very seriously in operas, even in Wagner. Now you're lucky if you get the hapless chorus to solemnly move about this way and that like a Presbyterian exercise class. How thrilling to see a full cast of "Carmen" really deliver in motion, or even to see "Magic Flute" blocked logically and with an eye toward the contribution of movement to a gesamtkunstwerk.
And, several decades into liturgical dance, where are we? Is the soil that barren, that nothing will grow there?
Liberated from the usual Broadway voice, some of that stuff is really cool. The other thought I had was that opera really needs to get kinetic. Time was that at least an hour of any given opera was solid ballet. Dance was taken very seriously in operas, even in Wagner. Now you're lucky if you get the hapless chorus to solemnly move about this way and that like a Presbyterian exercise class. How thrilling to see a full cast of "Carmen" really deliver in motion, or even to see "Magic Flute" blocked logically and with an eye toward the contribution of movement to a gesamtkunstwerk.
And, several decades into liturgical dance, where are we? Is the soil that barren, that nothing will grow there?
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