Word: lyrical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...folks who neither know nor care what musical produced the tunes. Yet Kern realized better than anyone else that the melodic drama in so many of his songs -- of which the majestic cresting chorus of Ol' Man River is the most famous example -- demanded a dramatic anchor only the lyric theater could provide. Of the thousand or so songs he composed, the only familiar one not written for a show or movie was The Last Time I Saw Paris. He mercilessly cut any song that did not fit its situation. Conversely, he was a great hoarder and tinkerer. Alter just...
...with satiric snippets depicting how that rhetoric translates into the raunch and squalor of an anonymous sexual underworld. The supporting cast all play multiple roles; Ken Kliban and Lily Knight are especially effective as an AIDS victim's estranged straight brother and tolerant chum. Hoffman has written rich, lyric dialogue for the leads: a budding writer (Jonathan Hogan) who is diagnosed as having the disease, and a former lover (Jonathan Hadary) who takes him back "as is" to nurse him. During the play's earlier off-Broadway run, Hadary played the lover as a near saint, but has now toned...
...very greatest drawings on the Morgan's walls is Rubens' portrait of his sister-in-law Susanna Fourment, a likeness breathed onto the paper with lyric, impalpable precision in three schematic chalks (white, black and sanguine), conveying the fullest sense of Rubens' appetite for character studies delicately balanced between intimacy and formality. Viewing such work, one realizes that there is no Rubens (or Durer, or Mantegna, or Watteau) of / the late 20th century; what we see here are emblems of a tradition that ended, except for footnotes, with Picasso...
...create new forms, new movements (environmentalism, say, or feminism), new companies, high-tech ideas that might have been stifled by traditional lines of authority. No doubt the enormous baby-boom generation would have effected changes anyway. But the war brought with it gusts of wild energy. "Freedom," said the lyric, "is just another word for nothing left to lose." The war, and the protest against it, shook loose forces in American life and gave them a style and prestige they might not otherwise have had. Suddenly, politics came dancing with a loony phosphorescence. There was a certain giddy proximity...
...noted the composer in his log the year before it opened. In Candide (1956), he had attempted such a synthesis, but that show was crippled by a bitter book that was vulgarized in its later revisions. With West Side Story, however, Bernstein's command of popular idioms, his soaring lyric gifts and technical skills got free rein in a show as powerful as a street rumble. West Side Story ran for 734 performances, became a 1961 film that won ten Academy Awards and was revived onstage several times...