Severe and unrelentingly grim, the piece is often difficult to watch; several audience members flinched during its most vicious moments.
However, in the second act, when the handsome Enver Chakartash comes out as the Captain and delivers his dialect in a flat monotone, the contrast between the dialogue and his delivery is so severe the audience burst out laughing.
Rush Limbaugh, the country's most popular talk radio host, with an audience that reaches 20 million a week, announced to his listeners yesterday that he had suffered severe hearing loss over the last four months and was almost totally deaf.
(A severe blow to the audience, perhaps, since the wife is Mad Men's Christina Hendricks).
Thanks to that and Advair's nifty delivery system a plastic purple puck that is easy to use the drug has moved far beyond a narrow audience of severe asthma patients to reach those with mild cases and nonasthmatics who simply have a bad bronchial cough.
Competition is severe, costs high, and the audience, never huge, seems to be shrinking every year.
As for the nonprofit theaters, a severe drop in donations and audience means "some nonprofits may go under".
Asked by an audience member how severe future spending cuts would be, Mr Cameron said they would be "manageable and doable", but that "efficiencies" would be needed.
The Britten — four songs from the William Soutar cycle "Who Are These Children?" — will expose audiences to a more severe aspect of the composer's creativity than usual.
He suffered from severe migraines, took to berating his audiences, self-medicated with a pharmacopeia consisting mainly of booze and painkillers, and he pitched some world-class anxiety attacks.
