The dramatic tension of "Secret Love" centers on whether the two sets of lovers can surmount the barriers of race, bigotry and their pasts.
The story involves the Cavaliere di Belfiore, who masquerades as the early 18th-century Polish king Stanislaus to protect the monarch, and the eventual correct pairing of two sets of lovers.
The action evolves around two sets of lovers in a plot complicated by mistaken identities, misdirected billets-doux, misguided wooings by not one but two country bumpkins and the meddling of relatives, one of whom is one of the English-speaking theater's funniest creations: Mrs. Malaprop.
(As indeed is the love that springs up with implausible symmetry among the three sets of lovers.) Mr. Herskovits's haphazard romp through "The Jew of Malta" does not bring as many rewards, although it should be noted that Marlowe's black comedy does not aim for the emotional depths of Shakespeare's.
"L'Ecume" has been compared to "Tristan und Isolde" and "Pelléas et Mélisande," but it is also a kind of surrealistic "Bohème," with two sets of young lovers who live in humble financial circumstances (even though Colin employs an imperious cook).
The scene is set for lovers to kiss on honeymoon, but the foreground is empty of figures.
A blogger who could write that has no poetry and will never, alas, know what Wolf describes as "the relaxation and stimulation provided by the set of behaviors a lover uses to arouse his or her partner".
From the beginning, Mrs. Monroe put herself at the setting of her lover's death.
Ravel's L'Heure Espagnole is what one always hoped for, a most beautifully constructed farce set to music, about a series of lovers being carried into a wife's bedroom in a grandfather clock.
Belmonte arrives and conspires with Pedrillo to steal the two ladies away from Selim's palace and back to Spain, but when Osmin catches them and alerts Selim, the Pasha decides to relinquish his beloved Konstanze to her Belmonte, saying "She who cannot be won by kindness must be set free" and sending the quartet of lovers on their way.
