Word: jam
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Some of those images were, in their grotesque way, priceless: a woman staggering down the street trying not to scrape her new, no-down-payment dining room table on the pavement; another lady attempting to jam her stolen sofa onto a pickup truck already overladen with loot. Modern America's great guiding principle, shop till you drop, was in process of revision; steal till you kneel was more like...
TITLE: JELLY'S LAST JAM...
THEATER Gregory Hines enlivens Jelly's Last Jam...
Playwright George C. Wolfe, best known for his unsparing satire in The Colored Museum, plainly has grander ambitions in mind for Jelly's Last Jam, a biography of composer and performer Jelly Roll Morton. The show is as much a review of Morton's racial politics and ethnic fealty as of his musical contribution as the asserted "inventor of jazz." The central plot point is that Morton was of mixed-race Creole ancestry and prided himself on his relative whiteness, even while immersing himself in, and transforming, black music. The show's theme is that neither he nor any black...
...Jelly's Last Jam fails as dramaturgy, it succeeds much of the time as bouncy entertainment, thanks to four people. Mary Bond Davis is a first-rate upholstered mama. Tonya Pinkins is sultry, sharp-tongued and sweet-voiced as Morton's love interest. Savion Glover, 18, outdoes his own brilliant best in tap-dancing the role of the young Jelly. And as the mature Jelly, Gregory Hines vibrates with the kind of glorious triple-threat talent -- as singer, dancer and actor -- that Broadway used to revel in but hardly ever witnesses anymore...