Word: broadway
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...stage became young Noël's Oxford and Cambridge; he was a professional actor at twelve and England's Neil Simon at 25, when four of his plays ran simultaneously in the West End. Porter was born wealthy and attended Yale and Harvard. His first Broadway show lasted two weeks. "You would be well advised," wrote one critic, "in considering the latest musical offerings, to see See America First last." Stung by the reviews, Porter retreated to France and did not compose a full score for the American theater until he was 35. Coward affected a brittle...
...piano, ready to recall the hits of four decades. Because shows are arranged in chronological order, the reader can watch Porter's growth from restless experimenter to self-assured master. Early on, the songwriter attempted to overturn the bromides of his epoch. When saccharine "Mammy" tunes permeated Broadway, he celebrated a black man who journeyed back to Tennessee only to miss "the great big tall skyscrapers/ And the elevated's roar,/ And he longed for morning papers/ That come out the night before...
...line between art and entertainment is often indistinct, and never more so than in musical theater. We tend to think of opera, the sung play, as the pinnacle of a form whose lower manifestations include the Viennese operetta and the Broadway show. But such rigid categorizing is myopic. Like M. Jourdain in Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who was delighted to discover that he had been speaking prose all his life, even composers with the most commercial motives may turn out to have been writing memorable, lasting scores. Two of the most electrifying operas...
...PARADE, a ton of beauty. I am fat and I am proud of it," crows Francine, the 350-pound Roman goddess of plump pulchritude in Alber Innaurato's Passione. Sex and food figure in prominently with the play's comic themes, as they did in Innaurato's highly successful Broadway production Gemini. But where the tasty humor and the social statement complemented each other will in Gemini in passione they form a somewhat less savory mixture. The bittersweet flavor Innaurato aims for is drowned in cloying source of sugary high-energy fun and the salty tears of a misplaced tugging...
...Broadway players were suitably daunted by the exacting precision of Blakemore's instructions and Frayn's stage directions (the script for the second act has two columns to describe the simultaneous goings-on of the two farces). Says Actress Deborah Rush, who plays a spaced-out tax auditor in Nothing On: 'They knew just how many breaths were required between the opening and closing of a door." Brian Murray, the beleaguered director of Nothing On, recalls that just before rehearsals began, "Michael Blakemore called us together and told us that in two weeks we'd wish...