Word: bloomings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...features the idiosyncratic singer-songwriter stalking his own subconscious, sounding like a cross between Hank Williams (on The Mortician's Daughter) and a skid-row Springsteen (on We Will Shine). John Prine had a wonderful new album a few months back, The Missing Years (Oh Boy), and Luka Bloom's The Acoustic Motorbike (Reprise) is like Celine in high spirits. It's all enough to make you believe that that staple of music-biz resurrection, the folk revival, is coming around again...
...keep right on changin' like you always do," he sings to Dylan, "and what's best is the old stuff still all sounds new." The thought could stand for the classic material on Good as I Been to You, as well as for Lucinda Williams' blues, or Luka Bloom's more introspective turns...
Lady Macbeth is easily the most gripping portrait of the evening. Bloom takes us through the stages of her disintegration. She sinks to the floor, wanders the stage, pulls at her hair, wrings her hands, looks wild, childish, ravaged, lost. Her soliloquoy "Come you spirits / That tend on mortal thought, unsex me here" is viscerally delivered, its cruel fervor made apparent. Bloom's composite of Macbeth is unusually harsh. In leaving out the "tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquoy--cutting right after "she should have died hereafter;/ There would have been a time for such a word"--Bloom's Macbeth...
...Lastly, Bloom offers us Rosalind and the lyrical forest of Arden. While she touches on some serious moments (i.e. the orphaned Rosalind dismissed at whim from the protection of the court), Bloom concentrates most of the portrait on the game-playing and love-playing in the forest...
With a playful delivery of Rosalind's epilogue, Bloom ends the evening in perfect form. "My way is to conjure you," she declares as Rosalind; Claire Bloom's way leaves us magically enchanted...