Word: duet
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...first Aida at La Scala in 1950, she startled the crowd by stalking about like a hungry leopard instead of taking the usual stately stance for her Act III duet. In the death scene of Fedora, in which sopranos tend to expire stiffly on a divan, Callas staggers from it, sags to her knees, drags herself up, crawls towards her lover's room, collapses again before she finally rolls down and dies. In Norma she has cried real tears. Operagoers. long reconciled to the classic, three-gesture range of other prima donnas, are astounded and delighted...
Structurally, the influence of light opera is apparent. Each act deals first with the peripheral characters and builds up to a big duet between Falk and Svanhild, the hero and heroine, with occasional arias for the hero (such as the celebrated tirade against tea). And each act even sports a men's chorus...
...good deal of the screenplay seems as dated today as the idle rich. Grace Kelly sings a duet with Crosby in a cool, innocuously pleasant little voice, does an alcoholic rumba with Sinatra, and looks thoroughly patrician, but she lacks the gawky animal energy that Katharine Hepburn brought to the 1939 play and the 1941 movie. Crosby seems as comfortable in the role of a singing millionaire as only a singing millionaire (which he is in real life) can be. but saunters through the part rather sleepily, without much of the old Bing zing. Sinatra plays the reporter like...
...then there is Louis Armstrong. When Satchmo does an eye-rolling duet with Bing (Now You Has Jazz) or belts out a hot wedding march on his trumpet, High Society becomes really yare...
...clipped-accented moppets (Mickey Maga and Rex Thompson) perform as the Duchin child at different ages. Moviegoers may enjoy the rippling piano notes (actually played by Carmen Cavallaro) that made Duchin a society favorite during the '30s, and there is one pleasant scene in which Power plays a duet with a small Chinese boy during his wartime tour of duty as operations officer of a destroyer flotilla...