Word: fiddlers
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Winner of ten Tony awards as producer and/or director of such Broadway productions as West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, Candide, and Company, Hal Prince has practically redefined the modern American musical, swapping its persistent tradition of formulaic fluff and glossy chorus lines for social themes and theatrical vigor. Pacific Overtures, his latest offering, features an all-Asian cast, score by collaborator Steven Sondheim, and a story based on Matthew Perry's invasion on Japan, sailed out of its Boston try-outs last week (after meeting with some rough weather from the critics) for a January 11th docking...
Imagine a somewhat insecure Bertolt Brecht writing a kind of Man of La Mancha about Maxim Gorky, the Russian Revolution and its after math. Add to this some of the folk flavor of Fiddler on the Roof and you get a rough approximation of what a strange and ambitious amalgam is represented by this musical now at Manhattan's American Place Theater...
Fortunately, the Yiddish in this film does not degenerate in a Fiddler on the Roof-like parody of Jewish mannerisms. Silver has wisely avoided this pitfall by having her characters converse in Yiddish where appropriate, and translating the conversation with subtitles. And while such classic Yiddishisms as "You vont that I should... "remain, they sound thoroughly plausible within the greater framework of this film. Mrs. Kavarsky is the film's greatest source of acerbic Yiddish wit, with such comments as "You can't pee up my back and make me think it's rain." She is the archetypal yente, always...
...five Sarah was a good enough fiddler to play chamber music with adults. By six she was giving concerts as far away as Chicago. When her mother married Henry Alexander, a political scientist at the University of Arkansas, Sarah was pleased. "He kept a dictionary on the dinner table," Caldwell recalls...
...concerts with the Band in 1974 when they had to coax him back on stage by playing "Stage Fright." This time he was confident, exuberant, and keeping it directed, bouncing on the balls of both feet, then going into a cocky strut across the stage, over to his new fiddler, Scarlet Rivera, and dancing around...