Word: lyrical
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...numbers written for her investigate the dark, angry range where Paige's powerful soprano lives. The show's best song, Nobody's Side, has Florence offering words to the wounded ("Never stay too long in your bed,/ Never lose your heart, use your head"), and Paige taunts the lyric into an anthem of cold-steel defiance. Here she evokes the clarion brass of Ethel Merman, the liquid phrasing of Barbra Streisand and the rasping energy of the Ronettes--an electrifying amalgam. Chess reveals Paige as the strongest, smartest voice in today's musical theater...
...above, such as Lambie Pie, Honey Bear and Poopsie, a possible reference to fatigue. There are also physically or emotionally descriptive terms such as Hot Lips, Heartthrob, Hunk and Cuddles. All of which have taken up residence in the language in both conversation and song, as in the distinguished lyric: "When my Sugar walks down the street/ All the little birdies go tweet, tweet, tweet...
...agree that William Pritchard's book on Robert Frost [BOOKS, Nov. 12] succeeds in restoring a positive, plausible view of the man who gave us great narrative and lyric poetry. But as Frost's granddaughter, I must protest the reviewer's harsh tone in depicting my grandfather's handling of family tragedies like his son's suicide. Your review resurrects Lawrence Thompson's literal-minded pseudopsy-choanalysis that I thought the Pritchard biography had laid to rest...
...lyric best, Williams gave us the powerful tension and drama of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). In Vieux Carre, written more than 20 years later, it has become more difficult for the author to rise above melodrama. And while we've certainly come to expect the simplistic repetition of the themes, there still is a limit to how much we can stomach of lines like, "People die of loneliness ...loneliness is so thick in this house, you can feel it,' and "There's no defense against the truth...
...gloriously fearsome opponent as the evil sorceress. Her blazing fury as she confronts her weak husband Telramund (Baritone Franz-Ferdinand Nentwig) near the start of Act II won a spontaneous ovation that stopped the show. Providing a worthy foil for Marton's villainy was Tomowa-Sintow, a lyric soprano with a pure, unforced voice that improved after a somewhat shaky first act; her fateful exchange with Ortrud in the second act's balcony scene evoked the stark contrast of light and dark that Wagner wanted. Alas, Elsa is not the most dramatically complex of Wagner's heroines...