Word: backgrounder
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Corsaro has the broadest theatrical background of any American director now working in opera. He plays the self-doubting undertaker in the new Joanne Woodward movie, Rachel, Rachel. His play, A Piece of Blue Sky, was done on TV in 1960. On Broadway, he directed A Hatful of Rain and The Night of the Iguana. What all this experience has given him is the confidence to look at an opera as though nobody had ever staged it before...
Mournful Wails. What they offer is a big, glossy, geared-up show. Flashing, multicolored panels of lights flank a glistening fountain in the background, while two go-go girls shimmy in the foreground. The band, massed in a double row facing the audience, is a discotheque in itself. While punching out blues riffs over a pile-driving beat, the brass and saxophone players whirl their instruments around and swivel through the shing-a-ling, the funky Broadway, and other loose-jointed steps-some of their own devising. Leaders in each section use hand signals to cue the choreography...
Only soloists with galvanic energy and commanding musicianship would dare to perform against such a busy background. Sam & Dave qualify on both counts. Weaving and dancing, they gyrate through enough acrobatics to wear out more than 100 costumes a year. Their voices-Sam's higher and more cutting, Dave's huskier and darker-toned-blend robustly in mournful, harmonized wails or fervent gospel-style shouts. And their listeners respond like converts at a revival meeting. "Sing it, Sam!" they yell, or "I hear you, Dave; good God, I hear...
...pessimistic moments of crisis and political unrest. Near the turn of the century, however, the search for a usable past that would somehow square the original American ideal with exploitive American practices began to be the constant concern of a handful of historians. Their efforts and ideas form the background of this book by Columbia University's Richard Hofstadter. The Progressive Historians tells the story of three men-Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles A. Beard and Vernon L. Parrington-who did the most to shape America's image of its history as a tapestry of continued progress. Part biography...
...Alexander, how do you do. Prefatory to my initiating our conversation, I would like to familiarize myself further with your background...