Verse:
Liebert, Dan
straightened hair. Unfortunately, the choreography through flying rocking chair, and at the end - as the single-parent most of the show was leaden, and the funny idea remained an ...
...Puri aside, the success of the piece lay in its the afternoon light and the limp, pink gown puppets, both the caricatured holy men and the unarticulated and my mother lies that smells of Sick Mother, but oddly expressive doll that represented the child of the behind the blank door...
...The use of light, projections, mechanical devices, imaginary prince is really her partner, Lit Daddy, the dramatic and all manner of theatrical niceties made the show more line is a case of the Masterbuilder meets the bluebird of impressive visually than it was musically or mythically, but happiness in your own backyard...
...Theater in Cambridge and the Houston Grand Opera...
...The most finished and rewarding production that I saw was At night my father comes The Juniper Tree, but it had the advantage of coming to This pain is not with hands like blocks of Philadelphia after having played at the American Repertory a slapstick blow wood...
...dips and ascends, ern but using Eastern instruments for occasional effects, was the drawn shades hush I glimpse her thin shoulders somewhat bland...
...to enter and kiss eaten by his father, re-emerge as a bird from the juniper tree And every event the amazing storm and drop a millstone on the woman's head...
...tion is that the real mother hovers around the action, in the person not only of the performer but of a life-sized doll riding a 21 November 1986: 633...
...Arthur Yorinks's book closely follows the tale of the of raveled nerve of the bedroom...
...Brothers Grimm on which itt is based...
...The sentimental hands with the now hovering stepmother...
...the affection, wit, and clarity already familiar from their records...
...GERALD WEALES achieve Mann's kind of irony, but it is one of the elements, along with a sense of menage, embodied in the narrator...
...slipping to the bathroom menage...
...That was not the posed Heads, an adaptation of Thomas Mann's novella, case with Bertilla Baker as The Incurable Dorothy Parker...
...Unfortunately, the choreography through flying rocking chair, and at the end - as the single-parent most of the show was leaden, and the funny idea remained an family settles down to a more conventional dinner - she joins idea, unrealized either visually or musically...
...A companion, adept heart of the libretto was the old show-business cliche about the at psycho-mythic interpretation, explained that the good star who had to choose between fame and happiness...
...the marvelous Morris, with the spirited help of Bolcom's A MORE INTERESTING first production was that of The Trans- piano, managed to still the beasts at the bar...
...Rajika Puri, who was trained in classical Indian dance, played the part barefoot and wearing a man's formal morning dress (a mixture Dan Liebert screen-door slam, of East and West...
...it lets the boy, chopped stitching her And later I am allowed up and stewed in a sour broth by the wicked stepmother and to the air...
...The show could hardly be expected to in its short life...
...If it can shake off its heaviness as it goes Of the cabaret performances I saw, William Bolcom and on to Washington - and perhaps to New York - it may turn Joan Morris were predictably fine, performing their songs with into the show the Ellington name deserves...
...which was co-sponsored by Lincoln Center Theater (where it She struggled gamely against the noise in the room, nor was played briefly...
...like paper...
...returned to the wrong bodies - a fable about the convergence Although not every event was a triumph, the cumulative and conflict of mind and body...
...sexual triangle of the story...
...The the flashpaper air The minute-hand other performers were less commanding and the music, West- to hurt her...
...and burning bread - throbbing repetition/variation sound of Glass under more con- but an exact needle a fellow exile ventional recitative and song which occasionally suggest dragging a thread from the drowned, silent city Menotti...
...and in the staging in front of and within a triangular the sound of blood and then the brutal sound enclosure, which became the shrine of Kali and echoes the tearing in her eyes of retching...
...The opera's addi- of dropped pot-lid, of her forehead...
...Migraine voice and movement, particularly when she dropped her dis- scars across tancing story-teller's tone to become the goddess Kali...
...lacked when I saw it...
...Since mother and the evil mother had to merge to free the boy from Queenie Pie, who has won the contest for years, is challenged his crippling complex, but I found myself beguiled by the way by a younger woman from New Orleans (Cafe O'Lay), and Jungian necessity looked like old-fashioned show-business since she gives up success for love when she discovers that her schmaltz...
...of male and female...
...In an interview in a festival effect of the many productions was testimony to the imporpublicity newspaper, Taymor comments on "the ironic view tance that the American Musical Theater Festival has achieved of Thomas Mann...
...A collaboration of Julie Taymor (direction, she helped by Kirk Nurock's musical settings of Parker's puppets, masks), Sidney Goldfarb (book, lyrics) and Elliot verse, which were sometimes soft, sometimes blues-y and Goldenthal (music), it is the retelling of an Indian legend about consistently wrong for Parker's small repertory of satiric deSita and her two husbands and how their heads are severed and vices...
...The to the Comic Mass scrambling eggs music by Philip Glass and Robert Moran has the familiar of the person...
...Both the sentimental and the the elements mixed comfortably in The Juniper Tree as they satiric elements demand a light touch which the show certainly did not in The Transposed Heads and Queenie Pie...
...She was impressive in harking dog...
Vol. 113 • November 1986 • No. 20
