Word: cabaret
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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European-style cabaret can-can succeed in Manhattan
...Lido in Paris? A cabaret on Tokyo's Ginza? Rio's Copacabana? Hardly. The revue, well named Kicks, is packing New Yorkers and visitors into the Rainbow Grill, which in the past has been celebrated more for its 65th-floor view of New York City than for closeups of prancing showgirls. The revue is risque, sassy, elegantly mounted, and amusing, and its success may say something about the city's mood in troubled times...
Though piano bars, jazz joints and discos abound in the Big Apple, the Rainbow Grill is the classiest cabaret today in a city that once boasted such lively nocturnal redoubts as the Blue Angel, Le Ruban Bleu, La Vie en Rose, the Latin Quarter, the Persian Room and Cafe Society Uptown and Downtown. The irony is that this topless tower should be in the heart of staid Rockefeller Center, built 45 years ago by a family not exactly famed for tripping the light fantastic. On the other hand, the Rockefellers have never been known to disapprove of profitability...
...with such nimble digestion. What he needed, he kept. He had no use for the tendril-like, decorative line of Spanish art nouveau, for instance, but he retained its liking for large, silhouetted masses, and they, grafted onto the pervasive influence of Toulouse-Lautrec, keep appearing in his Parisian cabaret scenes of 1901. Some of these are of remarkable intensity. Picasso painted Gustave Coquiot, a fashionable Paris art and theater columnist, as a sinister god of urban pleasure, green shadows straining against red lips in a pale mask of a face. Some of the women, their faces blurred by laughter...
...long stretch between them while Picasso, grappling with late Cézanne, crossed from an art of paroxysm to one of exquisitely nuanced analysis. In a work like Bread and Fruit Dish on a Table, 1909, Picasso picked up on Cézanne's monumentality. Originally Picasso meant to paint a cabaret scene with figures at a table, in homage to Cézanne's Cardplayers, but the image mutated into still life, leaving the drinkers' legs fossilized, as it were, in the sloping table legs. The great brown half-moon of the tabletop, the bread loaves and fruit and napkin have...