The story involves a gay community theater's attempt to put on a Christmas pageant, and it has exactly one funny bit: when an actor auditions for the pageant by doing a dramatic recitation of a for-sale ad from Craigslist.
The origin of this unusual suite was Debussy's "Chansons de Bilitis" (1901), incidental music written to accompany a dramatic recitation of erotic French poems by Pierre Louÿs.
The conch-shell duet and a dramatic recitation of Oscar Brown Jr.'s poem "Forty Acres and a Mule" by Ira Hawkins were the only two places in the concert that came close to an expression of ego.
The remarkable English actor Stephen Dillane gave a dramatic recitation of T. S. Eliot's seminal "Four Quartets," a mesmerizing 75-minute solo performance, done from memory.
But there was also Yolande Tatum Bryant, an elementary school music and theater teacher whose pre-classroom career included a stint as an unnamed nurse on "Guiding Light"; she wowed Mr. Caffey with a dramatic recitation from James Weldon Johnson's "God's Trombones".
He accompanied me to my hotel, and was deeply impressed by my dramatic recitations from memory of passages from Dostoyevsky's less prominent works.
When René Pape comes on at the end of Act II to thunder the role of King Marke, he seems to be giving Domingo a primer in the dramatic recitation of German.
Her sleepwalking scene, however, was described as having "the air of a too well-studied dramatic recitation".
Last year, the small Enitharmon Press published Heaney's retelling of Henryson's Testament of Cresseid - praised by Bernard O'Donoghue in the TLS as "a poem which is unmistakably his own" - and he is now engaged on the same poet's witty, homely Fables, with one eye on a new book and another on dramatic recitation.
Some styles were patently influenced by the importance of Chinese vocabulary and syntax, but others developed in response to the internal requirements of the various genres, whether the terseness of haiku (a poem in 17 syllables) or the bombast of the dramatic recitation.
