Word: lyric
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...been written. Like an opera, Phantom is almost entirely sung, and its characters are outfitted with sharply etched musical motifs. Except for the title song, there is no rock music in the score; instead it is a sweeping, romantic evocation of Belle Epoque Paris for coloratura soprano, lyric tenor and full-dress symphony orchestra...
...hoariest cliches justifying timorous programming is that there is always someone in the audience who has never heard Beethoven's Fifth. "For the first-time viewer, you've got to have Bohemes and Toscas and Carmens," says Ardis Krainik, general manager of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, whose company this season had an unexpected hit with Glass's Satyagraha. "Those are the things they need to bring them back again." But is sheer repetition of a handful of staples the way to cultivate new audiences...
...there a fatted calf handy? Robbie Robertson is back where he belongs, making records and writing songs, spinning out small chapters of fresh-minted American mythology, lyric and funny, funky and mysterious. He was ringleader of the Band, a seminal group that played like road warriors and sang songs that seemed to come from some new national folklore, timeless music conjuring a time that never was. He has been away eleven years now, ever since he organized rock's greatest farewell concert, 1976's The Last Waltz, during which he and the Band brought together "different spokes in the wheel...
...recognizable too (weddings, dances, late-night bars and lonely roads), but Springsteen tilts them so that familiar territory can suddenly seem like a forbidding landscape. Love hurts, love haunts, love heals in these songs. The title cut suggests an amusement-park romp but ends with the kind of lyric reflection that is perfectly plainspoken and impossible to shake: "The house is haunted and the ride gets rough/ And you've got to learn to live with what you can't rise above/ If you want to ride on down in through this tunnel of love." Raymond Carver, take a turn...
...Love; Who's That Woman?, a realization by a brassy belter (Lynda Baron) of how age has crept up on her; Could I Leave You?, an outpouring of vitriol from a neglected wife (Rigg); Losing My Mind, the pathetic admissions of a suppliant lover (Julia McKenzie). Sondheim's best lyric ever is I'm Still Here, an anthem of survival that compresses four decades of social history into the battered but unrepentant cry of a faded star. It gets a showstopping performance by Dolores Gray, who made her Broadway debut in 1944 and hasn't faded a bit. Follies seemed...