viperish

To name a few: Shirine Babb’s Kent and Michael Milligan’s Fool, who envelop Lear here in a touching mist of authentic devotion; Julian Elijah Martinez and Matthew J. Harris as villainous Edmund and heroic Edgar, brothers whose rivalry ends in a savage knife fight choreographed muscularly by Robb Hunter; and costumer Emily Rebholz, who wittily overdresses Lear’s viperish elder daughters — the delightfully vile Rosa Gilmore and Stephanie Jean Lane — as if they were cast members on “The Real Housewives of Stratford-upon-Avon.”

In opera, with its dizzying ambitions, epic lead-times and viperish politics, the stakes are celestial — and the scale and complexity of the “Ring” ratchets everything up even further.

Grubbing up gossip, Wolff is deliciously viperish, and on his publicity tour he augmented the already scandalous record by implying, with no evidence at all, that Trump and Nikki Haley used Air Force One as their flying motel room.

I didn’t even understand what it was all about until Grandma, seeing that I had come in, said, “Tell that viperish adulteress to listen to God’s Word!”

She was to play the Voice, a viperish whisper in Joe’s ear.