Word: balladeers
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...transported in a time machine to a different tonality of mood, one has only to listen to Moritat (Ballad of Mack the Knife). Datelined 1928, here is the authentic shiver of Nazi gangsterism stalking the streets of doom. All the great numbers follow - Alabama-Song, Surabaya Johnny, Bilbao Song, Ballad of the Pimp and the Whore. In all these songs, a caustic social vision is wedded to a winningly expansive lyricism. This Cabaret is a feast for Broadway...
...leering, contorted expressions and jerky, stage presence give no hint of the size, strength and confidence of his baritone voice. His solos, "Mathilde" and "Amsterdam," demand the most stamina and brashness of the Brel songs in this show, and McIntosh has plenty of both. In "Amsterdam," a lurid ballad of drunken sailors, he bellows the lines with as much force and volume as anyone would want in the small confines of the Leverett theater, yet manages to make almost every word intelligible...
...Judge and The Assassin ends with a cinematic non sequitur; a strike breaks out in a never-before-mentioned-factory, Isabelle Huppert, last seen as the sodomized mistress of Rousseau, now appears as an aspiring diva, singing Bouvier's favorite ballad-off-key, and the entire striking mob is bathed in a Hallmark card glow. The police prepare to shoot and the screen goes black as these significant words appear: "in the year that Joseph Bouvier killed twelve children, 16,000 died in the mines of France." Both facts are terrible; is Tavernier suggesting that Bouvier should not have been...
...brings rock to the music hall, overlays it with suggestions of '50s club jazz and well-shaken pop, and comes up with a sound that seems to fall between any two stations on your radio dial. You can drift easily along with an aged-in-wood Price ballad like i Love You Too and nearly not hear the scalding observation "Love only lasts until believers leave us" stashed between choruses like a serpent in the sheets. Price is a jaded romantic with a misfit imagination and a battered social conscience, a lapsed rocker who has taken the middle ground...
Aicient Athens had its bards. Medieval France had its jongleurs; Elizabethan London, its ballad singers and costermongers. Today, U.S. cities have their street musicians: modern minstrels who weave their fragile melodies over the pedal point of trucks and subways, amid a chorus of honking horns and an obbligato of blaring transistor radios...