Word: folkish
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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FIDDLER ON THE ROOF strays a world away from Broadway to capture the happiness and the hurt, the folkish airs and graces of a small Jewish community in a Russian town in 1905. Zero Mostel, an intuitive and masterly recorder of the mind's merriment and the soul's grief, gives this musical an unfaltering heartbeat. A male wedding dance with empty wine bottles perched in men's hats is a tingling high spot...
This affinity for Hemingway is also evident throughout Days and Nights. With its terse, ungarnished lines, its relatively simple, folkish characters, and its love story, evolving in the midst of battle, this novel is especially reminiscent of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Yet, beneath the Hemingwayesque prose, characters, and situation, there runs a strong nationalistic strain which lends Days and Nights its own, special power and gives it a quality very different from that of the Hemingway novel...
...Cathy's Clown, Please Help Me, I'm Falling. The last, say the experts, is the "countriest" of all, a distinction that suggests the difficulty these days of distinguishing a true "country" song from a straight pop number. The basic C. & W. ingredients have always been a tune with folkish overtones, lyrics of Pleistocene simplicity, and a theme preferably proclaiming undying devotion to a faithless loved one. But country music is now wearing city clothes: the traditional fiddle and guitar accompaniment is being replaced by saxophone, drums, violins and even harpsichords. Many a country record is arranged for trio, quartet...
...stage and Bette Davis and Leif Erickson act it out, Sandburg's world remains dramatically mild, a little ostentatiously benign, its warm iron-kettle juices mingling the flavor of sage and ham. At its best, an evening whose themes move from the cradle to the grave is both folkish and individual. Often it is less folkish than folksy, and at its worst it is cute enough to make J. M. Barrie seem austere. Nor do Corwin's comments help: instead of stressing the pungent and appealing in Sandburg, he hails him for leaving "obscurantism to the esthetes...