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Title: Fairies and Queens
Review: I've only listened to excerpts from 'The Fairy Queen' before this so I don't know its original form. I've always understood it to be a masque in which spoken word and music were combined much like German singspiel. This performance is through-sung in the usual operatic manner alternating aria with recitative. I have no objection to this or to the musical performance. The visual part however is a disaster. Whoever was responsible for it took a lame and obvious turn on the word 'fairy' and presented the fairies as the more flamboyant elements of the gay and lesbian sub-culture. The mortals, again obviously, are corporate types in gray suits except for a drunken poet. I suppose there was a plot to follow, but it was too obscure to bother with. The performance is messy, the costumes are messy, and the sets are messy, and they all have little relation to the music's Baroque formality.
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