Word: musicalities
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Among Broadway?s musical classics, South Pacific has long had a special mystique. An instant critical and popular smash when it opened in April 1949, it swept the Tony awards, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama and ran for a then-extraordinary five years. For a generation of postwar theatergoers, it was cherished like almost no other American musical. In my own parents? rather sparse record collection, it was the one original cast album that got played over and over - the Broadway show music that provided the soundtrack of my childhood...
...show seems to have lost a lot of luster among musical-theater tastemakers in the last half-century. The two Rodgers & Hammerstein hit shows that preceded it, Oklahoma and Carousel, have been revived and reappraised many times since: parsed by the critics for their innovative integration of music and storytelling, hailed for their breakthroughs in dance and staging. But South Pacific remained strangely missing in action. At a time of revival mania, when shows like Guys and Dolls and Gypsy (now having its third Broadway revival in little over a decade, in a fine production with a titanic star turn...
...MUSIC...
...classical-music conductor taking the podium always becomes a peacemaker of sorts. The central mission of conducting, after all, is to dispel discord and bring dozens of competing voices into concert. The Israeli maestro Daniel Barenboim, 65, sees in this act the opportunity to bring a deeper kind of harmony to one of the most violent and vociferous regions in the world: the Middle East...
Balance is essential to the Divan orchestra and to Barenboim himself. Music is at its most satisfying when an expression meets its counterpoint. Barenboim says the 2003 death from cancer of Palestinian intellectual Edward Said--Barenboim's friend and co-leader of the orchestra--was "catastrophic" for an orchestra based on Arab-Israeli parity. In January of this year, Barenboim made a symbolic gesture: he accepted Palestinian citizenship and became a dual national...