Word: piaf
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Piaf. The Sparrow's song-brief in ecstasy, extreme pain-was the predawn Paris blues. Tribute in kind was paid Piaf in the searing Tony Award-winning performance of Jane Lapotaire...
Steve Martin filters laugh-a-minute zaniness through Redford good looks: goy meets Berle. Mull intones mantras of malevolent banality. Tomlin incarnates sorority queens and shopping-bag ladies with the intensity of Piaf and the emotional range of either Hepburn. Brooks works the baroque side of the street. Kaufman's characters populate a doll's house of the bizarre. They are as different from one another as bright young people can be. But they share a basic belief-that the business of America is show business -and a fascination with the detritus of the entertainment industry. Steve Allen...
...Piaf, their latest show, opened Feb. 5 to mixed reviews but good business. Rose, the next on their list, is scheduled to premiere March 26, with Glenda Jackson playing the same part she did in London, that of a schoolteacher frustrated with life in the provinces. Only one of their shows, Home, failed to make back its investment (some $300,000), and even that, says McCann, will probably turn a profit after its planned road tour...
Lapotaire renders Piaf, the diminutive poet-songstress of the pre-dawn city blues, with matchless psychological fidelity. She gives us Piaf, whom the French called the Sparrow, as an eagle in courage. She makes us know Piaf soul-seared, the Paris gutter urchin, the cagey whore whom the world came to hold in the embrace of fame but who could not keep her own life from seeping through her splayed fingers, at 47 in 1963 spent by alcohol, morphine, sex and cancer...
Some people are bathed in a perverse glory, as if they were Lucifer's play things instead of God's creatures. Piaf was one of these, and Lapotaire never lets us forget it. The play unfolds through sketchy vignettes, some of which are disconcerting, such as the ones that have Marcel Cerdan, the French middleweight champion and Piaf's love of loves, being played by a black, and a Marlene Dietrich who is downright frumpy. A medal of merit should be struck for Zoë Wanamaker; as the prostitute pal of Piaf's who later achieves...