Word: balladeer
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Nims offers himself as an old-fashioned lover of forms, both female and poetic. He bows gracefully to ottava rima, the sonnet and ballad. "Verse without rhyming was a toothless mouth," he insists at one point; elsewhere, he disguises his own bite with barely detectable assonances like "hankering" and "merry thing." He toys with words to tickle emotions. In "Dawn Song," a man gets up after a night of lovemaking and praise from his partner, and faces himself in the bathroom mirror...
...were empty seats in London's Adelphi Theater a fortnight ago, and those loyalists who had come were applauding their own memories as much as the D'Oyly Carte production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado. Listeners knew not just Nanki-Poo's Wandering Minstrel ballad by heart, they knew Pooh-Bah's dialogue. They would have grumbled if any of the costumes, designed by Charles Ricketts in 1926, had been changed. But of course, there were no changes...
...discarded thought from Agnes de Mille's brain. To save the saddest for last, much of the show's score sounds like an aside from Sondheim. Fragmented strains from Pacific Overtures, A Little Night Music, Company and Follies filter through the air like aural ghosts. One ballad, Not a Day Goes By, beautifully captures the bittersweet mystery of love, and the single smash number of the musical, Good Thing Going, has the stamp of permanence about it. Frank Sinatra, who has impeccable judgment in such matters, has already recorded it in his current album. The album goes...
Also two valiant efforts from old warhorses the Stones and the Kinks. The Stones' Tattoo You has been bought by everyone in Boston, so I'll just comment that as good as the music is, the lyrics only matter on the second, ballad side, whereas ten years ago, "Sympathy for the Devil," "Satisfaction," "Gimme Shelter," while quick, all had something to say. The Kinks' Ray Davies, on the other hand, starting to recover from a decade's drunken stupor, has never been so lyrically biting. Give the People What They Want works on many levels; the fast songs reflect...
...pleasurable theater and unwilling to be taught, Cutler has dismantled most of the instructive apparatus of Brecht's theater. But for the second Threepenny Finale, the placards bearing song and scene titles--the visual, literal representation necessary for didacticism--are wanting. While the narrator (Lars-Gunnar Wigemar), a ballad-singer, stalks about the stage describing subsequent scenes, this is not enough. He simply reduces the value of the lesson to be learned to the level of a nice story. The didacticism is lost to sentiment...