Word: lyricize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...lyric-based summary resembled Director Harold Prince's production in relying on superficial descriptions of major events. But Prince's technique ideally suits his purposes. As Eva Person manipulated the media and her people, so too does Evita direct the audience's attention from one newsworthy scene to another. Prince suspends a large screen above the stage onto which he projects news-reels and still photographs of Eva's activities: meetings with the Pope, France, and Argentinian peasants. The Life magazine technique creates excitement which allows the audience to observe the real Evita's magnetism and beauty while an equally...
...Other lyrics evoke laughter of a different nature, "Screw the middle classes!" Evita demands. Sometime thereafter, she sings, "Don't Cry For Me Argentina," whose introduction contains the cliche-ridden lyric. "You wouldn't believe it/ Coming from a girl you once knew/ Although she dressed up to the nines/ At sixes and sevens with you." An otherwise wonderful "High Flying Adored" includes this unusual rhyme; "I'm their savior. That's a what they call me/ So Lauren Bacall me." Fortunately, though, the last lyrics are overshadowed by stage action as Evita rushes back and forth, gradually transforming herself...
...hours of the morning they catapult you from bed, ending sweet dreams with an abruptness Freud never could have explained. At breakfast they jar your attention from your Raisin-Bran, startling you into sudden alertness more effectively than the strongest black coffee. These aren't the lyric chimes of the famed House bells. They are Harvard's reminder to Lowellians that, mid way through October, construction still continues on the half century old structure. And they are not too subtle...
...into serious liberation, you been takin' the mickey. I got your number, mate. You're the original pig. Numero Uno." Despite the leather gear, dyed hair and garish makeup, Miles recognizes this apparition as an old, inspiring friend. She is Erato, the classical Muse of lyric poetry and, by historical default, of fiction as well...
...failure of The Confidence Man does not necessarily mean a corresponding failure of musical idiom. The quality of Rochberg's lyric invention is high, and the fast-moving sequences, such as the minstrel show, are handled with dashing technical assurance. Even the two scenes with the angel, ironic though they are, display a strong command of modern musical materials. Rochberg has issued a challenge in The Confidence Man, to both himself and other composers, a challenge to make modern music speak again in the language it inherited from the 18th and 19th centuries. Whether it can be done persuasively...