Word: concert
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...like some musical Rip Van Winkle, a 19th century man awoke today in a concert hall or an opera house after decades of slumber, he would find that things had hardly changed. Stirring to life in his seat, he would pick up the comforting strains of a Beethoven symphony. Blinking his eyes in the theater's darkness, he would notice the familiar sets of a Verdi opera. Only after he stumbled to his feet at the end of the program and sought out his horse and carriage would he learn that, for the rest of the world, time had indeed...
This may seem a severe indictment of a healthy "industry"; audiences for concert music and opera are probably larger than ever. The postwar cultural revolution spawned scores of new orchestras, opera companies and chamber-music groups; there are now 1,572 symphony orchestras in the country, almost as many as the number of daily newspapers. Visits of major domestic and international ensembles to Carnegie Hall still provoke feeding frenzies among ticket buyers. Everywhere, it seems, there are more performances, longer seasons, higher budgets, higher fees -- and higher costs...
...dance, like the mambo. Nor is it a folk band, like a mariachi. Nor should it be confused with maracas, those hollow gourds filled with dry seeds that shake, rattle and roll south of the border. Most audiences could not pick it out of a percussion lineup, and concert managers flee at the very mention of its name. For Leigh Howard Stevens, to be the world's greatest classical marimbist must sometimes seem a dubious achievement...
Robin Williams stalks a concert stage, conning inspiration from the ether. In a nightclub, a customer's name will spark a from-nowhere verbal riff. And in the course of an hour's interview, he will miraculously inhabit the skewed brains of two dozen apparitions. Among them: a meat-eating Mahatma Gandhi, Gomer Pyle with a case of VD, Elvis Presley drafted for Viet Nam, Wheel of Fortune's Pat Sajak and, of course, a singing hunchback. Here is Williams speaking about his role as Good Morning, Vietnam's gonzo deejay: "God, it can't get any more right than...
...pennant-festooned high school gymnasium in the imaginary Midwestern town of Oil City, four musicians who grandly call themselves the Oil City Symphony have come together for a reunion concert. There is Mark the pianist and accordionist, a geek with glasses in a white dinner jacket and purple slacks who is also the minister of music at his church; Debbie the drummer, an ex- prom queen in a strapless gown who exchanges one pink pump for a running shoe, the better to thump her bass drum; Mary the violinist, of stern Scandinavian stock, uptight, humorless and "best remembered locally...