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From:  Isabelle Bracamonte <ibracamonte@y...>
Isabelle Bracamonte <ibracamonte@y...>
Date:  Sat Sep 1, 2001  7:22 pm
Subject:  Re: [vocalist] Anybody see "Little Women" on PBS?


Hello, Vocalisters! It's nice to be home again.

We watched Little Women, and my thought was this: One
of the problems in taking a long, sedately-paced novel
and compressing it into a kind of serial of "greatest
hits" moments (which you have to do in order to
telescope a very long book into a two-hour opera) is
that you entirely miss characterization. With the
exception of Jo, there was no characterization of
anyone in the opera.

If you hadn't read the book, you neither knew who Beth
was nor cared that she was dying. The characters
weren't adequately introduced and it was simply a
string of new people coming in and out, with the
presumption that the audience had read the book and
was familiar with the people and plots from the
beginning. That, I think, was the problem with the
opera.

On the other hand, I saw the (totally musically
inferior) opera of Streetcar, having never read the
play or seen the movie, and followed the plot very
well. I understood what was going on in Little Women,
but neither my husband nor my mother (neither of whom
had read the LMA book) kept up with the rapid
introduction of characters, nor did they care when Meg
was married, when Beth died, or when Amy married
Laurie. If it's simply a trip down memory lane,
reminding you of the book characters you knew and
loved in your childhood, it is more effective -- but I
think that makes it an inferior stand-alone piece of
art. As a documentary of Jo, surrounded by a whirl of
characters and events to which the reader is
indifferent, it was a rather boring opera.

Them's me thoughts. Good to be back.

Isabelle B.

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  Replies Name/Email Yahoo! ID Date Size
13907 Re: Anybody see "Little Women" on PBS? Karen Mercedes   Mon  9/3/2001   12 KB

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