Word: minstrels
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...letter to Vara, Moore wrote that the concerned student groups considered the act “no different from historical forms of blackface, minstrel shows, and other acts featuring disparaging characterizations of black people...
Working with a teacher who was not afraid to dress as a minstrel and to play Medieval music for the “jeans-and-sneakers generation” inspired...
...Irish tenor. ... The limitations of Astaire's voice forced him to find another way - deceptively casual, never oversold, and at home with the American vernacular. Astaire moved the 'scene' of the singer from the center of the great hall to just across the table, in effect replacing the Minstrel Boy with Ordinary Guy, U.S. version." Whereas Louis Armstrong abstracted a song's lyrics into a plangent growl, Astaire mined their meaning with mediocre vocal equipment. It's a coin toss to determine which one was the first modernist pop singer...
This hokey 1958 Broadway hit has justly languished in dinner theaters ever since. Now, in a radical revision at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum, playwright David Henry Hwang treats the original like "some kind of weird Oriental minstrel show," as one character puts it, and wraps its assimilationist anthems into a merry multicultural trip from Tiananmen Square to San Francisco's Chinatown. Director-choreographer Robert Longbottom adds a dollop of kitsch--and somehow the mix is funny and clever. It even jerks a tear or two. Broadway, get ready...
...either the film maker or his hosts had in mind. Apparently realizing that the devastation was too great to make sense of, Kiarostami takes shot after shot of bereft kids, most of them singing, nearly all of them smiling. After a while, alas, this approach looks like exploitation - a minstrel show starring dying children...