Word: africanism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...amazed archaeologists 2,400 years later. Then the Hong Kong Philharmonic steals in with a simple yet radiant tune in D major--the key of Beethoven's Ode to Joy--and a children's choir begins to sing, accompanied by the soft throb of Chinese drums pounding out an African-flavored beat...
...mostly, she asserts, "they let me do what I wanted to do." She has expanded the story a bit and added several engaging new songs, including three by Elton John and Tim Rice, the original composer and lyricist, and several African tribal numbers adapted from music written for the film by Hans Zimmer and Mark Mancina. Getting her complex production into stageworthy shape, however, has not been easy. First, just before rehearsals started in Minneapolis, Taymor had to have emergency gallbladder surgery. Then, she faced a host of technical problems, from malfunctioning props to elaborate scene changes that couldn...
...earthbound because of a cable foul-up. Taymor deals with such matters each day in a series of notes to crew members. "It felt very dark as the grass came in," she told stage manager Jeff Lee one afternoon, referring to the women wearing grass headdresses to represent the African savanna. A burst of unexpected applause from the audience covered up a key musical passage. Timon wasn't lighted properly in the waterfall scene. The wildebeest costumes were shedding...
...harem pants and body glitter; he urges his black actors to grimace grotesquely and gives them fearful patois to spout ("I run until I's black in de face," says a man fleeing a Latin American revolt in the 1931 Be Like Me). He was not alone in caricaturing African Americans. Crosby, whose crooner inflections owed much to black musicians, wears blackface in the 1932 Dream House--as Jolson did in The Jazz Singer...
DIED. ROBERT WEAVER, 89, the first African American appointed to the Cabinet; in New York City. In 1966 President Lyndon Johnson named him to fill the new post of Secretary of Housing and Urban Development at a time of intense inner-city turmoil...