Hints and tips:
...James Barton was a zesty and loveable Widow Simone and Tzu-Chao Chou made a klutzily virtuosic Alain....
...In Norfolk, the Marquess of Cholmondeley’s Palladian Houghton Hall is transformed by James Turrell’s LightScape....
...Additional reporting by Patti Waldmeir in Shanghai, Song Jung-a in Seoul, Anthony Deutsch in Jakarta, Peter Smith in Sydney, James Lamont in New Delhi and Jane Rickards in Taipei...
...Robert Brubaker blustered heroically as Mao, Richard Paul Fink bumbled deftly as Kissinger and Russell Braun exuded mysterious dignity as Chou En-lai....
...It notes gifts of “modest tsunami aid and debt relief” plus “a new bust of [China’s first premier] Chou Enlai for a Chinese-built conference centre”....
...James Callaghan, Britain’s prime minister in the late 1970s, was lambasted for saying “Crisis, what crisis” when he returned from an overseas trip to a strike-torn Britain. Except he never said it....
...The couple is still together. 1986: Walks the Camino de Santiago – the Way of St James – the 500-mile pilgrimage across northern Spain....
...A subtext of the opera is the transition of power from Mao to Chou En-lai, to which Mark Heller and Chen-Ye Yuan ably contribute, and Thomas Hammons is a slippery Henry Kissinger....
...Napoleon’s quote about China has launched a thousand articles – and an excellent book by James Kynge, the former Financial Times correspondent in China....
...The opera has dated, and so has Sellars’s semaphore stage direction, but James Maddalena’s Nixon is as sincerely human as ever. Janis Kelly’s Pat is a similar triumph....
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