Word: chorus
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Phair's guitar playing has a likeable, warbling strangeness; she is developing into a stronger, more varied songwriter. Her best new track, May Queen, has a melody that ranges more widely than the ones in her previous compositions, and her songs sometimes break out of the verse-chorus-verse penitentiary of most rock 'n' roll. Shane, for example, has no chorus. It's about disquiet before a war, and it ends with Phair repeatedly singing, "You've gotta have fear in your heart," an unsettlingly effective close...
...Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Winchell wrote that the "most fateful hour of the most fateful week of history is at hand." Only a careful reader of the chapter notes will learn that the very next item in his column that day began, "Maxine Moore, one of the prettiest chorus girls in Lew Brown's big hit, Yokel Boy, is now in Chicago to apply for a divorce...
...whole of the novel, Kern and Hammerstein wrote a great deal of material that was later discarded. Trying to piece together an "authentic" version of a show with more variant editions than Boris Godunov, therefore, is nearly impossible. Wisely, this production restores one of the early casualties, the chorus Mis'ry's Comin' Aroun', a plaintive lament that acts as a kind of fate motive throughout the show (it is heard in the orchestra, for example, when the ne'er-do-well gambler Gaylord Ravenal first catches sight of the sweet, ingenuous Magnolia). Another addition is the charmingly coy duet...
Behind it all, of course, is the estimable Hal Prince. His delineation of character detail remains as telling as ever (contrast Andy's smooth shuffle with Ravenal's hesitant walk), and his handling of crowd scenes is impeccable: a nod here, a gesture there, and a chorus is transformed from a mob into a collection of individuals. There are no haughty white folks and nobly suffering darkies aboard Prince's vessel -- just real people who know that sometimes it's not only make-believe. The beauty of this Show Boat is that it makes believers...
...returned for "Space," and after some fiddling with various MIDI sounds, the music resumed with a tight and rocking "All Along the Watchtower." The "Standing on the Moon" that followed turned out to be the highlight of the show. Like "So Many Roads," "Standing" ended with Garcia repeating the chorus ("I'd rather be here with you" in this case) into a thrilling crescendo that brought the whole band to a boil and the crowd to a roar...