Word: mamas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Before or after seeing Whoopi, the cobra is advised to trek uptown to 104th Street for the season's joyfullest noise. Mama I Want to Sing is a "story in concert," in which a disc jockey narrator spins out the tale of a young girl who dreams of becoming a pop singer. Her father is a Harlem minister, her mother a traditionalist who believes the only good music is God's music. This becomingly naive plot--a black Jazz Singer or a prequel to Dreamgirls--is sturdy enough to support a dozen or so knockout gospel singers, with a spirit...
...both sides of the footlights, Mama is very much a family affair. The audience is composed largely of black families in their Sunday best, and onstage Doris Troy presides over the service; this is her story, and she is playing her own mother. The show was written by Vy Higginsen (Troy's sister) and Kenneth Wydro (Higginsen's husband); Higginsen frequently plays the narrator, and her brother Randy plays the minister. After the rousing curtain call, Randy moves to the theater exit and, ever the good shepherd, greets the congregation as it leaves...
...place called Macondo begins cropping up in the stories, as do the names of some who have figured prominently and mysteriously in its history: Colonel Aureliano Buendia, JoséArcadio Buendia. The village-universe of One Hundred Years of Solitude makes brief, embryonic appearances. Big Mama's Funeral (1962) seems a small dress rehearsal for the extravagant saga that was to follow. The death of Macondo's matriarch sends nearly everyone into frenetic activity. Lawmakers debate: "Interminable hours were filled with words, words, words, which resounded throughout the Republic, made prestigious by the spokesmen of the printed word...
...This is, for all the world's unbelievers, the true account of Big Mama, absolute sovereign of the Kingdom of Macondo, who lived for 92 years, and died in the odor of sanctity one Tuesday last September, and whose funeral was attended by the Pope...
...U.S.A. but weeded out in the final editing process, is simple, stark, folk-inflected and filled with a kind of cold-sweat compassion for its protagonist, a Viet Nam vet returning home. The lyrics are full of stabbing detail: this vet's wife "called up her mama to make sure the kids were out of the house/ She checked herself out in the dining room mirror/ And undid an extra button on her blouse." As in Ernest Hemingway's seminal short story Soldier's Home, the reunion is full of restless memories and long shadows...