Word: barroomful
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George Gershwin's early years were the heyday of ragtime and the blues, of barroom and bordello "perfessers" in spats and hats, of Tin Pan Alley song pluggers and sidewalk player pianos, whose invisible hands held passersby enthralled with their fascinatin' rhythms. So young George was only doing what came naturally when, at age 18, he sat down to cut a piano roll of his first published song, a frisky ditty called When You Want 'Em, You Can't Get 'Em, When You've Got 'Em, You Don't Want...
...marvelously unclassifiable entertainment, which is having a limited run ending this week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, are a witches' brew of cabaret, silent-movie slapstick, Expressionist psychodrama, Japanese theater, lounge lizardry and high-tech wizardry. What keeps it bubbling is a melodic succession of wheezy parlor waltzes, barroom blues, moon-June pop and ersatz Kurt Weill. What gives it fizz is gallows humor, antiwar mockery, sweet sentiment and an inventiveness that more than honors the imperative laid down years ago by Sergei Diaghilev to Jean Cocteau: "Astonish...
...hurt people. Political correctness argues that the price of peace in a racially diverse America may be suppressing ideas that cause such pain. Perhaps that could mean a more civilized nation. Up to now, though, America's genius has not been in its civility, but rather in its raucous barroom brawl in search of the truth...
...bits of orchestration and songs dropped from the original. Director Prince and his co- creators acknowledge their backstage affinity, although they also cite the show's literary significance as one of the first musicals to take on political subjects, integrate song and dance into the plot and range from barroom tunes to operetta. Prince calls Show Boat "the first great modern musical...
...hurricanes are Mother Nature's barroom brawlers, swiftly finishing their business and heading for the door, floods tend to behave more like unwanted houseguests: they park themselves in the living room, tear up the furniture, and generally make a nuisance of themselves for weeks or months before finally having the decency to pack up and hit the road. That's not good news for residents of the Mississippi River Valley, who long after floodwaters have crested will play host to a chocolate-colored inland sea sprawling across the spine of the Midwest -- a stagnant, festering stew of industrial waste, agricultural...