But if the play's powerful emotional core draws you into its strange currents, you may find yourself taken to heights of emotion (sad depths, really) that theater too rarely achieves.
Patrick Kevin Day of the Los Angeles Times praised Michael Giacchino's musical score, writing that "I'm reminded of the heights of emotion this series can evoke".
This work by Seurat underscores how his colleagues believed that music had the power to capture the heights of emotion and suggestion more easily than painting; they often tried to match the level of music.
4. Jonathan Nott/Bamberg Symphony Orchestra: It's conducted and played with fastidious and immaculate attention to detail, but Nott's performance also reaches the heights of Mahlerian emotion and extremity.
The book's own ambitions are along those same modest lines, and yet the author, after a shade more meditation on time and change and existence than proves absolutely vital, rises to unexpected heights of quiet emotion.
"I guess great Shakespeare actors like McKellen, Dench, Mirren, Branagh and company have the capacity to scale the heights of human emotion that Shakespeare charts in roles like Lear, Hamlet, and Cleopatra," notes Gregory Doran, artistic director of the UK's Royal Shakespeare Company.
"The antigun sentiment is at a height because of the tremendous amount of emotion associated with it, but there's probably the same percentage of people who are in favor of the Second Amendment as those who are in favor of these stringent laws," said Daniel Cruson, the town historian.
In the tradition of Italian opera, Otello includes a "state scene" with a grand finale, in which stunned onlookers comment on the passions opposing the protagonists, but, like Rossini's final act, Verdi's reaches heights of simplicity and emotion unlike any opera that had gone before.
At its height the bond between eastern Europe and America was based, like the best marriages, on a mixture of emotion and mutual support.
