Word: jolson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Rolling Stone readers, is Peter Frampton, 26. No wonder. His latest album, Frampton Comes Alive!, has sold 10 million copies, and 2 million fans this year have seen and heard the gyrating rock singer in concert Frampton's modest explanation of his success: "I do what Jolson, Sinatra, Tony Bennett and the Beatles did-what all the greats do. I communicate." Frampton has signed to make a movie in which he will play a rock star who sings the Beatles' songs. The film's title: Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band...
...Esther (here surnamed Hoffman), an overnight rock sensation. This is a reckless casting choice. Streisand is a showboater, a sort of one-woman Hippodrome whose roots are in the brassiest tradition of the American musical theater. Hearing her light into a rock song is like listening to Al Jolson sing Leadbelly. In partial anticipation of this problem, Streisand, who gives herself a credit for "Musical Concepts," has laid on a score that is only supposed to give the impression of rock 'n' roll. Instead, it will probably put off her fans and cause undue mirth among audience members...
...Jazz Singer. The first talking picture with the biggest star in America, Al Jolson, on his knees for half the movie. This has the famous "You ain't heard nothin' yet" line and a few songs. In a strange way it is a fascinating movie, almost irresistible in its strange view of Lower East Side New York life. If you look, you'll see William Demerest, hardly a day younger than he seemed twenty, forty or fifty years later...
...Howe shrewdly compares to Italian opera (where the emphasis is on virtuoso performance rather than content), was not shy about amending Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet was set in a Polish village, and Friar Laurence was recast as a Reform rabbi. The famous performers originating in the ghetto included Al Jolson, the Marx Brothers, George Jessel, George Burns, Eddie Cantor, Sophie Tucker, Fanny Brice...
This plum has been given to Irene Worth, a great actress. She overwhelms the play, with a sexy vibrato not unlike Al Jolson's, and stalks the stage like a jaguar vacationing among field mice...