Master Class

(Paperback)

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Description

The world can and will go on without us but I have to think that we have made this world a better place. That we have left it richer, wiser than had we not chosen the way of art. The 1996 Tony Award winner for Best Play. Terrence McNally's Master Class presents the legendary opera diva, Maria Callas, as she puts aspiring young singers through their paces in a series of master classes. Both moving and entertaining, this theatrical tour de force dramatizes the Callas phenomenon and "is an unembarrassed, involving meditation on Callas's life and the nature of her art. Such subjects are not easily dramatized, certainly not with this brio." (New York Times) After opening on Broadway in 1995 with Zoe Caldwell and Audra McDonald, the play premiered in London in 1997 with Patti LuPone. It was last revived on Broadway and in the West End in 2011-12 starring Tyne Daly.

Reviews

McNally's well-crafted, quip-filled drama which depicts Callas teaching at Juilliard, circa 1971 (her voice was virtually destroyed by then) is less a biography and more a love letter to La Divina. * Entertainment Weekly *
Terrence McNally's brusque and brilliant rendering of Callas is the sort of meaty role actresses love to sink teeth and claws into * New York Daily News *

Author Bio

Terrence McNally won his third Tony Award for his play Master Class. He received the 1995 Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics' Circle Awards for Best Play as well as the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best American Play for Love! Valour! Compassion! His other plays include A Perfect Ganesh; Lips Together, Teeth Apart; Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune; and It's Only a Play, all of which began at the Manhattan Theatre Club. He also wrote the book for the musical adaptation of Kiss of the Spider Woman, for which he received a Tony Award. Other stage works include Bad Habits, The Ritz, Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone, And Things That Go Bump in the Night, Next and the book for the musical The Rink. McNally wrote the screenplays for Frankie and Johnny and The Ritz and a number of TV scripts including Andre's Mother for which he won an Emmy Award. He received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, a Lucille Lortel Award and a citation from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2020.