This updating has some imaginative bits.
In this updating I am bound, however, to register some problems.
In less able hands this updating might have resulted in a novel that felt tricksy without being especially innovative.
Ms. Mann notes that this updating of an old legend would have been understood as an allusion to the Inquisition.
It is hard to see how this updating adds an illuminating dimension to a well-known ghost story of betrayal and misplaced greed and passion.
This updating seems perfectly legitimate, since the point was not to recreate the original but to bring the score to life.
James Robinson's production moves the action to the start of World War I, and this updating gives many exchanges a new poignancy, mainly because Mr. Robinson and the stage director, Sam Helfrich, paid attention to the details of character direction.
The latter's Master and Maid cabaret, performed with Figaro's wife Susanna, is a saucy ditty – this updating doesn't extend to political correctness – and a neat precis of the Count's masterly ways as evidenced in Mozart's opera.
James Robinson's production moves the action to the start of World War I, and this updating gives many exchanges a new poignancy, mainly because Mr. Robinson and Sam Helfrich, the stage director, paid attention to the details of character direction.
Described by its creators as the flip-side of ET and Close Encounters, this updating of HG Wells's classic tale offers the usual Spielbergian paradigm of dysfunctional families brought together through outlandish crisis.
But this updating matters less than the shift of focus on to Ranevskaya's guilt-ridden grief at the death of her son, which she sees as a punishment for her sexual sins.
