Word: lyricisms
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...show, assembled by that preeminent scholar of Broadway music, Robert Kimball, had some nice arcana, like Mercer's rejected lyric for a Harold Arlen tune that, thanks to Ira Gershwin, became "The Man That Got Away." And at the end, one of Mercer's most important interpreters came on stage: Margaret Whiting, still a pistol at 81. The night I attended, she went dry on some lyrics to "One for My Baby," then won the audience back by muttering, in her best saloon-chanteuse alto, "Of all the songs to blow, it had to be this...
...alone ballads and dance tunes. Ira referred to the show as an operetta and, in the Gilbert and Sullivan mode, each song fits into the plot, advances the improbable story and fleshes out the characters, all the while parading its jazzy insouciance. Sometimes Ira can be just on the lyric side of lewd. In "Never Was a Girl So Fair," a hymn to Miss Devereaux's allure, the pols sing: "What a charming epiglottis! / What a lovely coat of tan! / Oh, the man who isn't hot is / Not a man!" The Encores! production, staged by John Rando (who directed...
...children troop into the theater to ask questions of a highly important nature. Their target is the writer Neil Gaiman, whose fantasy book for kids The Wolves in the Walls has just been made into a musical that opened in Glasgow last month and transferred to London's Lyric Theatre for two weeks before going on tour in Scotland next month and England this fall. Gaiman explains to his young fans that the book was inspired by a nightmarish fantasy his daughter Maddy once had. The children are rigorous cross-examiners. "But from where exactly in her bedroom...
...apparently his lyric “Come on baby make sweet love to me”—from “Some Girls’” “Beast of Burden”—didn’t appeal to the morality of those stuffed-shirt mandarins at the Ministry who are most famous for putting the “culture” in Cultural Revolution (before informing on it and packing it off to Upper Manchuria). But perhaps there was a more ideological basis for their concerns...
Perhaps both. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' 2003 debut, Fever to Tell, careened between art-school punk--the song Tick repeated the word tick an ear-curdling 49 times--and vulnerable pop exemplified by the hit Maps, in which O chased after a lover with the lyric "Wait/ They don't love you like I love you." As the rare avant-garde band willing to dip a black-painted toenail into the mainstream, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs attracted a small but protective following that many bands would kill for, but they weren't satisfied. "We don't want to preach...