Word: lyricist
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When Composer-Lyricist Stephen Sondheim and Director-Librettist James Lapine completed their Pulitzer-prizewinning musical Sunday in the Park with George in 1984, they began exploring two new ideas: to create from scratch a classic myth or fairy tale for the stage and to bring together Lucy, Ralph Kramden and other memorable sitcom characters in a single overlapping story for a TV special. Eventually the two plans sort of fused. Instead of the sitcom figures, the authors decided to jumble larkingly together the characters and archetypes popularized by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. The strikingly original yet completely...
...success in exile has been based on a comparatively modest output: three books of poems translated into English and a collection of essays, Less Than One, published last year. Yet his imagination, steeped in classical and European traditions, seems familiar and accessible to Western readers. Brodsky is a lyricist of loss, of the slipping away of the past, loved ones, youth; his customary tone is one of passion tempered by hard-earned irony. His poems rely heavily on visual impressions, as in this look at the scenery surrounding a state farm: "The horses, inflated casks/ of ribs trapped between shafts...
...lights dim, his reedy voice is heard intoning the title tune. At the curtain, after a pleasure cruise through the likes of You're the Top, Friendship and It's Delovely (the latter two lifted from other Porter shows), a giant lighted-up portrait of the composer-lyricist, who died in 1964, descends to smile benevolently...
...that score he seldom failed. With Ira as lyricist, George composed the up tunes that seemed the antidote to depression, financial or psychological. Composer Alec Wilder remarked, "Since Gershwin was rarely given to sad songs, what could have been a more welcome palliative for the natural gloom of the times than the insistently cheery sound of his music?" The sound never fades. This year there have been TV specials, new recordings and productions like the Glyndebourne Opera Festival's sellout Porgy. Next season a musical will be fashioned from the old melodies, with a new book by Neil Simon...
...policymaking arm of the U.S. Government. "Abe Sofaer is a great New York lawyer," Governor Mario Cuomo told a breakfast group. "If they tell him 'Make it legal, Abe,' he'll make it legal." Sofaer refuses to get caught in a law-vs.-policy dogfight. He cites Lyricist Sammy Cahn's dictum that it is impossible to say "what comes first, the music or the words...