Word: music
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Fair Lady still leads the musical field, with The Music Man a close second, and Redhead (Gwen Verdon up), followed by Flower Drum Song, just about rounding the box-office turn...
Founded four decades ago as a "musical bridge between East and West," Takarazuka (named after its home town in Japan) presents thinly disguised Broadway and Paris turns, together with jazzed-up versions of Japanese fairy and folk tales, all held together in a sukiyaki-like mixture of muted native music and brassy show tunes. The 400 girls of the Takarazuka company (their motto: "Be pure, be right, be beautiful") sing everything from high soprano to near baritone, and the male impersonators among them pass out pinup photos by the thousands to their frenzied teen-age following...
...audience might well have frightened any composer out of his augmented triads: it consisted of 600 moppets between five and twelve. Children, so the theory goes, are the ideal connoisseurs of modern music, because they have no built-in esthetic prejudices, and last week Venice's prestigious International Festival of Contemporary Music paused in the midst of its strenuously avant-garde schedule to put the theory to the test. In the baroque Fenice Theater, the kids saw nine one-act Games and Fables for Children, composed on commission by a group of noted moderns...
Critics were less amused than the audience. "Some of these composers," said Corriere della Sera severely, "falsified their music to please the children. That means they have sold their souls to the devil, which disqualifies them to write for the innocent." The final word was left to elegant, 62-year-old Composer-Critic Virgil Thomson. "I have no opinion on this performance," said he, "because I think Venice is not for children anyway and can only be appreciated when one is over 70 years...
Perhaps the only mistake which the makers of Golden Demon made was in the title, which suggests violence and Oriental supernaturalism like that in Ugestu and Gate of Hell. Lest anyone be driven away by visions of gibbering 16th century warriors and otherworldly music, it should be explained that the "golden demon" is money and the film is about love and pride in Japan of the 1890's. It contains the striking color photography of Michio Takahashi, with its scrupulous attention to mood and detail, a high level of emotional excitement sustained throughout an uncomplicated plot, and fine acting...