With Salome, Al Pacino returns to London stage after 30-year wait (Ben Beaumont-Thomas, The Guardian).
Al Pacino has said he’ll return to the London stage in 2016 in a production of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome, over 30 years after he last appeared in the West End.I'm sure Mr. Pacino makes a fine Herod. Salome herself was played by Jessica Chastain in the Los Angeles production, but she has yet to be cast for the London one.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, Pacino promised there would be a full production of the play that he’s already performed in New York and Los Angeles, the latter filmed in 2006 for a cinema version that is currently on release. Describing Pacino’s filmed performance, the Guardian’s Mike McCahill said that “Pacino’s vulgar, ethnically indeterminate Herod furnishes this banquet with easily digested ham: if he can’t quite bring all of Wilde’s often florid imagery into focus, he’s given it a good shout – literally so, in places.”
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Opera music, comic book art tell story of Salomé’s Dance (Webster Post).
Greece, N.Y.Close, but not quite. The New Testament tells the story about the unnamed daughter of Herodias. Josephus tells us the name of Herodias' daughter, but he does not tell the New Testament story and he gives a different reason for John the Baptist's execution by Herod (i.e, to prevent him from fomenting a rebellion). By combining the two accounts, we infer that the girl in the New Testament story, whatever its historical merits, was meant to be Salome.
To most of us, Salomé is a salacious symbol of sexual excess — but that wasn’t always the case. A striking new production combines the illustrations of famed comic-book artist P. Craig Russell with music to tell the biblical story of a beautiful and sensuous young dancer. Russell’s evocative graphic novel, based on Richard Strauss’s opera Salomé, will be accompanied by a reworked instrumental rendition of the opera in presentations at the University of Rochester and its Eastman School of Music next month.
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In the New Testament, Salomé is not identified by name, but simply as the daughter of Herodias, the wife of King Herod. When the girl’s dance pleases the king, he promises her anything she wants. Prodded by her mother, the girl asks for the head of John the Baptist, who had condemned Herodias and Herod for their unlawful marriage.
The ancient Jewish historian Flavius Josephus also recounted the story, naming the young girl Shalome. Over the centuries, Salomé came to represent the dangers of the life of the flesh as opposed to John the Baptist’s life of the Holy Spirit, and was depicted as an alluring, lustful, and dangerous female.
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