The Seattle Post-Intelligencer praised her performance: "The third act becomes a star-crossed, "Beauty and the Beast" parable far more operatic and tragic than anything the original filmmakers could have imagined, exquisitely pantomimed by Watts with a poignancy and passion that rates Oscar consideration".
/ But that is the lot / Of the tragic operatic heroine.
But Mr. Turnage and Mr. Thomas have given us a tragic operatic heroine, a downtrodden nobody determined to make it, to "rape the American dream," as she puts it, any way she can.
And so throughout her career she would be found joking and laughing uproariously in her dressing-room only minutes after giving an overwhelming performance of some tragic operatic heroine.
But the real story of Egidio's is a saga of operatic and occasionally tragic dimensions, one laced with immigrant dreams, fierce sibling rivalry and romance lost and found.
Crawford, whose gloss, at fifty, was replaced by an angular, operatic intensity, brings tragic grandeur to the role of a sophisticated and lonely manuscript typist, a sort of muse to local literary aspirants, who meets a brash, garrulous young man (Cliff Robertson) who quickly falls for her.
With audiences able to follow Wagner's librettos, this complex mythological tale of sacred treaties made and broken and the catastrophic mingling of gods and mortals, of curses, hatreds and impossible hopes passed down through generations, emerges as an engrossing, humane and tragic operatic epic.
Henze's operatic subjects take in the tragic, the comic, the mythic and the exotic.
The piece is very much a musical rite of passage from youth to adulthood, the games of the outer movements flanking the mature central Andantino, with its broken melodic phrases that suggest the tragic nobility of operatic recitative.
