Word: new
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Enter Marie Christine, probably the most highly anticipated of this new art-musical genre. Lyrics and music are by Michael John LaChiusa, one of the most acclaimed of the post-Sondheim composers. It has a story of thematic heft and historical color: a retelling of the Medea myth, set in the Creole society of New Orleans in the 1890s. It stars Audra McDonald, the three-time Tony Award winner who showcased the music of LaChiusa and other art composers on her CD Way Back to Paradise. And it has received an extraordinary buildup from the New York Times, the Only...
RETIRING? NOT SO FAST The new year may prompt you to review retirement plans. The Social Security retirement age, set at 65 for many years, will gradually increase until it reaches 67. If you were born in 1938, add two months to your work life. Born in '60? Make it two years. Says Don Blandin, president of the American Savings Education Council: "Americans who had expected to retire at 65 with full benefits will need to adjust their plans to ensure they will not have a shortfall in income...
...John McCain, it was a moment in the sun: Veterans Day, a brilliant New Hampshire afternoon, the onetime war hero soaking up the applause at soldiers' homes and Main Street parades. But McCain didn't want to talk much about domestic hot buttons like health care and Social Security, or about his swelling poll numbers, or even about campaign-finance reform. "I want to talk for a moment about Chechnya," he said to a few reporters on his campaign bus, before launching into a critique of Russia's "brutal to the extreme" war and announcing that if he were President...
Sometimes it is: McCain will often fill his travel time with animated discussions about global hot spots from Chechnya to China. When a local New Hampshire pol asked him a question about Lebanon last month, he unfurled a lengthy answer that included a consideration of whether Syrian President Hafez Assad will be succeeded by his son Bashar or his brother Rifaat. While McCain swipes at Bush's reliance on foreign-policy gurus--"When there is a crisis," he says, "I won't have to consult advisers"--he talks shop with many members of the foreign-policy firmament, including Jeane Kirkpatrick...
Though his ability to wrap his voice around a romantic lyric arguably ranked him near Elvis, Sinatra and Lady Day, the pop balladeer (and jazz pianist) Nat King Cole is unfortunately perhaps best remembered today as Natalie's dad. Epstein's insightful new book--best read while listening to Cole's rereleased album The Christmas Song--should remedy things. The biographer sometimes digs too deep into esoterica, spending pages analyzing the lyrics of Straighten Up and Fly Right, for example. But when he recounts the singer's personal struggles, including a shocking 1956 onstage kidnapping attempt by Alabama racists...