Word: les
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There's a special flavor to music heard live in clubs: more relaxed than on records -- often fiercer too, with inhibiting mikes out of the performers' way. The first releases from Night Records, a new Virgin Records label specializing in live performances, catch four jazz stylists (Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Les McCann, Eddie Harris and Cannonball Adderley) in moods that seldom found their way onto more formal recordings. Kirk, best known for his atonal virtuosity in blowing three saxes at once, plays clarinet with a traditional New Orleans band in a sly, down-home version of The Black and Crazy Blues...
...Liberty, big white Cadillacs and Fred Astaire, but whose one certainty is that he was born to live the American Dream -- a hope he will never fulfill. The propulsive narrative works at all times as both romantic melodrama and astringent metaphor. If neither as sprawling nor as thrilling as Les Miserables, the previous musical from French creators Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg, the new show is vastly more relevant and thought provoking...
Director Nicholas Hytner, in reshaping his London staging to the much smaller Broadway space, made some numbers more intimate but merely cramped others. And even more than in the original version, the show sorely lacks the cinematic fluidity of Les Miserables or The Phantom of the Opera. But Hytner has triumphed at the end, making what used to be an unbearably depressing suicide mercifully less graphic. With set designer John Napier, he has found a less realistic, more suggestive look that better serves the metaphorical layers of this most ambitious musical -- yet is entirely congenial to that helicopter...
...immediate prospects of the bill's passing are quite good. Several important foes of gun control, including Les AuCoin (R--Oregon), rallying to its support. Even the White House, with lifetime NRA member George Bush at the helm, is said to be rejoicing at the opportunity to support the bill, under the cover of Reagan and within the framework of Bush's own crime bill...
...timetable he accomplished with Miss Saigon in London. Such claims of financial wizardry might be suspect from almost anyone else but this disarmingly frank and casual ex-stagehand. A keen intellect with a common touch, he presented four of the foremost international hits of the '80s, Cats, Phantom, Les Miz and Little Shop of Horrors, and is regarded as the world's nonpareil producer...