Word: ballads
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...night before, officers of the Greek (ex-British) destroyer Hastings had invited British officials and Anglo-American newsmen to an "Olympic torch party" in a restaurant. The party was gay. Lieut. Colonel John Casey, a pink-faced, ginger-mustached member of the British mission, was singing a Greek ballad, Mavra Matya (Black Eyes) when a burst of Communist machine-gun fire thudded into the building. One gendarme was killed trying to douse the lights; the others got down under the tables. Casey went on singing in the darkness to cover the departure of two Greeks who sneaked out, reached...
...wasted on relatively dull human beings: the Healthy Juvenile who owns Crown Jewel (Robert Arthur); his tomboy girl friend (Peggy Cummins, prettily poured into dungarees); her growling, boozy grandfather (a deadly conventional role all but redeemed by Charles Coburn's restraint); Burl Ives (singing a weird, savage ballad about two battling white stallions, which contrasts oddly with the picture's prevailing genteelism...
...play with integrated songs and music). The ancient Greeks had a name for it, too-but Broadway is still trying to find out how to do it. Oklahoma! was a step in the right direction. Last week Experimental Theatre came closer yet. Composer Jerome Moross and Lyricist John Latouche (Ballad for Americans) had cooked up three song-&-dance plays called Ballet Ballads for Broadway's connoisseurs and critics to sample. The critics found the dance-music-drama experiments "no end diverting and pretty . . . both rare and welcome...
Although the music is Gerschefski's the lyrics are taken verbatim from TIME'S story in National Affairs, which was writen by Robert Hagy. The ballad's production became a Spartanburg communal project. It is arranged in four parts for orchestra, women's chorus and baritone solo. The baritone was a local coal and sand man; the orchestra and chorus were made up of college music students, housewives and Spartanburg businessmen. They rehearsed for weeks, not only for the ballad but also for the rest of the 35-year-old festival's program...
...that his ballad has had a hearing, Gerschefski is carrying another TIME clipping around in his pocket. It is a story called Man Overboard (TIME, March 1) and is concerned with the ship's carpenter who fell off the Grace Liner Santa Clara one bright day in the Caribbean and was miraculously recovered by his ship, which had discovered his absence and put about for him. Gerschefski doesn't know whether it will make a ballad like Half Moon Mountain, but he is strongly inclined...