Word: heywards
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...weak link in City Basketball for the past few years has been Columbia. Ever since Jim McMillian graduated to find his place in life as the quintessential team player on the Knicks and Heyward Dotson accepted a Rhodes Scholarship, Columbia fans have shown about as much enthusiasm as a vegetarian fishing a caterpillar from his salad...
Lowdown Blues. Likable it certainly is. This production, though sometimes lethargic, comes closer to the original conception of Gershwin and Librettist DuBose Heyward than any previous stage version. Houston's key decision was to treat Porgy and Bess as a real opera rather than a somewhat fancy Broadway musical. That meant restoring a good deal of rarely heard music. Gershwin's recitatives have traditionally been replaced by spoken dialogue. Most productions have entirely eliminated a brief, sensual scene showing the night life of Charleston, with the character Jasbo Brown playing some lowdown blues on a splendidly...
...bank's president announces to its board that he is dying, and for 500 pages First Mercantile's two highest-ranking vice presidents have at it for the top spot. One of the rivers, Alex Vandervoort, a Harvard-educated nonconformist, is the good guy, and the other, Roscoe Heyward, a neurotic First Mercantile lifer, is the bad guy. Up until about page 275 Roscoe appears to have it sewed up, but then the tide begins to turn and by the end he has botched things so badly that he is forced to jump off the Headquarters Tower and leave Alex...
...fascination with it, Hailey himself is an outsider to the world he writes about--he was born in England and is a Canadian citizen--and understandably he does not have a perfect grasp of the social relations of the American ruling class. Making Roscoe Heyward a Boston Brahmin, an aristocrat, with an only son who is a certified public accountant, may seem to Harvard sensibilities to be ever so slightly off, but it is the kind of minor point that doesn't mean a great deal. Though life in general and Hailey's obsession, class, in particular, are infinitely subtle...
...these associations alone don't sketch out an ideology, the action of the novel certainly does. Alex Vandervoort, the hero, is liberal; he lives with an intelligent woman lawyer, tries to have the bank help people in the ghetto, and is scrupulously honest. The villain, Roscoe Heyward, fluctuates wildly between extremes; he is either snooty or obsequious, asexual or consumed by satyriasis, teetotaling or drunk. He is basically conservative, and in favor of directing the bank more toward high finance and less toward small depositers, but he is also obsessively ambitious (something Alex is not (and pragmatic enough to desert...