His abstract, relentlessly grim staging of Mascagni's "Cavalleria Rusticana" compels Eva-Maria Westbroek (Santuzza), Marcelo Álvarez (Turiddu), and George Gagnidze (Alfio) to substitute stentorian vocalism for dramatic insight.
His goals may be admirable, but his abstract, relentlessly grim staging of Mascagni's "Cavalleria Rusticana" compels Eva-Maria Westbroek (Santuzza), Marcelo Álvarez (Turiddu), and George Gagnidze (Alfio) to substitute stentorian vocalism for dramatic insight.
The latest grim staging-post on Portsmouth's continuing decline came last night when the 2010 FA Cup finalists – along with Hartlepool – were relegated from League One as a result of Oldham's 1-0 victoverover Yeovil.
"Instead, all the projections suggest that the three million figure will be a grim staging post on the road towards a public health emergency and this unfolding tragedy is already putting huge pressure on the NHS and will have potentially devastating consequences for those people who develop the condition".
It gave way seamlessly to the Ullmann work, in a grim but affecting staging by David Schweitzer in which a central notion was a long historical view of the havoc-causing Emperor Überall.
(James R. Oestreich) 'Tosca' (Tuesday) The consensus on Luc Bondy's production of Puccini's "Tosca" for the Met, introduced in 2009, is that this muddled, grim and tawdry staging was one of the bigger duds of recent years.
But perhaps today's most Tatiesque auteur is Sweden's Roy Andersson, who builds elaborate city sets in his Stockholm studio on which he stages grim black-comedy scenarios involving huge casts.
La Cava was a master at staging grim, painful subjects with a comic tone, as if to do an end-run around studio bosses and censors alike and make movies that howl in agony even as viewers howl with laughter.
But the options, at this stage, are grim.
And of course there was William Walters, the grim-faced, bearded veteran stage manager whose every appearance, following P.D.Q.
