Word: bernstein
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...crazy sailors on shore leave that he called Fancy Free. At a time when most Americans thought ballet meant women in tutus pretending to be birds, Fancy Free looked more like Fred Astaire than Swan Lake, and the music, a raucously jazzy score by another boy wonder named Leonard Bernstein, had MADE IN THE U.S.A. stamped on every page. Jerome Robbins took two dozen curtain calls that spring night in 1944, and never looked back...
...Like Bernstein, Robbins--who died last week at 79, after a stroke--was a crossover artist long before the term was coined. In the '50s and '60s, he spent much of his time working on Broadway, staging such landmark productions as Gypsy and Fiddler on the Roof; he made Mary Martin fly in Peter Pan and taught the Jets and the Sharks how to rumble in West Side Story, the urban updating of Romeo and Juliet that was his (and Bernstein's) most enduring contribution to the American musical. But classical dance was his true love...
...also managed to miss the fact that many men call themselves feminists. We're not the wishy-washy cliches of popular culture, either. We simply respect women, oppose attempts to keep them relegated to second-class status and join with women in the cause of equal rights. RICHARD B. BERNSTEIN New York City...
...chilly night on Chicago's Near North Side, and Bill Tomes is sitting comfortably in the warm interior of his silver Buick Park Avenue. Playing softly on the stereo is his favorite cassette, Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic's Saint-Saens. For a moment, at least, the melody seems to have transported him away from this place he calls the "killing field," an eerily barren patch of inner-city landscape that glows starkly in his headlights...
These moments shed light on the whole play, and are far better than the Twins' turn at exegesis (Jorge Rodriguez and Ray Courtney, scene eleven), which came close to coherence. Another wacky moment in the that-almost-made-sense category was scene ten, "It Saw Charles Bernstein Suspended in a Shimmering Column of Light." Not only does this allow for surefire alien-abduction topos, but it gives Marler a chance to shine as he who laments the paucity of men who "can tell a parastatis from a syntagma...