Word: ballads
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...fate on a pedestal, and, while not worshipping it, at the very least affirms its primacy in the governance of our lives. Some will take this as an excuse for the singer's recent course. Yet how can we not respect the passion and conviction with which this haunting ballad is delivered...
...store and gazes solemnly at the disco posters that cover the back wall, her eyes moving from one to another, surveying all their details. But the music playing in the shop is not disco; it is the sad and beautiful voice of a woman singing a classical Indian ballad. The young girl stares blankly for more than 15 minutes. She slowly lowers her head and walks back out into the sunlight...