Word: lyric
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...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...
...Everything will be simple: simple and deep. There won't be anything else; only nihilism and music." Compared with the allusive qualities of the book, such statements can seem as obvious as a Goodyear blimp. But they cannot overshadow Dickey's talent for mating small details, his audacious lyric power and technical risks. At times he splits the page into two columns, the left registering the impressions of Cahill, the right a simultaneous visual sighting of events...
Athol Fugard's great gift as a playwright has been an almost journalistic evocation of the distorting impact of apartheid on blacks and whites in his native South Africa, coupled with a lyric ability to lift those observations to the level of metaphor. It is not enough for an artist to be right-minded on even the most potent political issues of his day. To earn a lasting place in literature, to rank with Ibsen or Shaw or Brecht, he must also demonstrate subtlety of craft, power of language and insight into character -- and probably must reach beyond his immediate...