Word: backups
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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They could be right. When the Madonna show detonates at about 9 p.m., after a forgettable 30 minutes by a raunchy rap band called the Beastie Boys, the strongest impression is of being back in the '60s, listening to the Shirelles. This is no girl group; Madonna's two backup dancers are male and masculine. But they are small and unmenacing, dressed cheerfully in handpainted jeans and jackets, and when they frisk about the stage with Madonna the mood is light and childish. She wears spiked boots, black fishnet tights and a hip-slung miniskirt below her winking belly button...
Then she is back for her best number, carried onstage in a reclining posture by her backup dancers, looking like Madam Recamier in her salon, twirling a long rope of pearls and camping a mile a minute. "This is," she sings to a pop reggae beat, "a material world. And I am" pause "a material girl." Luxuriating in materialism, poking fun at greediness -- she is performing for adolescents who feel deprived if their cars don't have quadraphonic cassette players -- Madonna is singing that she is available to the highest bidder, then denying that. And at the end, she pulls...
...Martha Reeves, looking better than ever as she reprised her Vandellas anthem, Nowhere to Run. Something new: Patti LaBelle joining Joe Cocker in an unlikely but inspired duet of his You Are So Beautiful. Something borrowed: the Four Tops stepping in at a moment's notice to sing backup to Boy George and Stevie Wonder in his new Part Time Lover. And something blue: Marilyn McCoo's rendition of Am I Blue? as a tribute to Ethel Waters. When the show didn't sing, it danced: Gregory Hines tapped in tribute to Teddy Hale, then Sammy Davis Jr. introduced seven...
...power of the play comes from the barely suppressed rage of its central characters: Ma Rainey (Theresa Merritt), a fierce, massive singer who has reacted to prejudice by creating an isolated world in which she need not tolerate the least compromise, and her backup trumpet player (Charles Dutton), a keenly ambitious composer-arranger who is fixated on the memory of his mother's rape by white thugs. When these two potent wills clash, the bystander who suffers is, inevitably, one of their own and not a white oppressor. Episodic and slow but vividly real in portraying even minor characters...
Schindler was a backup outfielder as a freshman and a backup first baseman since then. Last year he made his first college pitching appearance, when he earned a save for three innings of work...