Word: ballads
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...best tracks are Thad Jones' bittersweet ballad Yours and Mine and the group's dramatic perambulation through Stevie Wonder's Living for the City...
...years she has been a member of the Met's energetic rival, the New York City Opera. At the start, her career was decent but unspectacular, notable mostly for her sweet laments in Douglas Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe. She achieved her major reputation with a blinding display of Baroque wizardry 8% years ago in Handel's Julius Caesar. Subsequent years brought triumphs in Massenet's Manon; Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and trilogy of queens, Roberto Devereux, Maria Stuarda, Anna Bolena; and more recently, Bellini's / Puritani. Vocal fireworks are Sills...
...appeal, its wholehearted trafficking in musical cliches imparts an air of ingratiating delirium. There are the usual lavish numbers-including a reproduction of a Billy Rose Aquacade -staged with a satiric glint by Director Herbert Ross (The Last of Sheila). But the best tune in the show is a ballad (If I Love Again), delivered quietly by Streisand as she stands with a song sheet over a piano. The writers have also supplied a fair number of punchy Broadway wisecracks. Says Caan, proposing to Streisand as he flashes a hulking ring: "I paid retail...
Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris suggests a similar means of torture. Imagine being imprisoned for life inside one of those actively gloomy cabarets where the only entertainment is French popular music. Whatever the glories of France, popular music was never among them. Whether ballad or brassy show-stopper or (deliver us) rock 'n' roll, every French pop song sounds as if it is being pulled out of an accordion. Those who cannot imagine what the ordeal might be like but are still curious should check out Jacques Brel. Others might well beware...
...lyrics ("We're not exactly in Utopia. Our queen could scarcely be dopier") don't seem up to the rest of his script, either. In the second act, the silliness of having songs at all often lends them a certain amount of sense, as in the case of a ballad sung in suitably Gilbert-and-Sullivanish style by Greg Minahan, as a response to Otto da Fe's discovery of half the cast in the act of escape from his deadliest dungeon. But in the first act, especially, not even Voight Kempson's professional choreography makes the songs more than...