Word: pianos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...move. Taped for broadcast on CBS on May 27, the show may sound better on television than it did live in Carnegie Hall. But it did have its high points: Broadway and TV Star Nell Carter hip-hopping through Alexander's Ragtime Band, Michael Feinstein singing I Love a Piano, and Garrison Keillor reciting All Alone. But then there were the lows: tinny amplification, an overpowering brass section, Bea Arthur's oomphless Hostess with the Mostes' and Leonard Bernstein's self- indulgent twelve-tone parody of A Russian Lullaby. Bernstein was also notable for ad hoc choreography. In seamless motion...
...with music. Has there ever been a songwriter like Berlin? Play a simple melody, he wrote, and he has: about 1,500 songs, show tunes and standards, ragtime and ballads, slow wistful waltzes and brisk up-tempo two- steps, reveries and reveilles. I love a piano, he sang, and have man and instrument ever been more symbiotic, the one giving voice to the other...
...Hedda Gabler's discontent, as we vaguely infer from the play's early scenes, has something to do with her recent marriage to the bookish George Tesman (Erik Salovaara). Hedda is not what you would call the Stepford wife type. She gains pleasure from slamming doors, playing loud piano mazurkas, and polishing gun barrels as opposed to silver flatware. As she so matter-of-factly puts it, "I have no talent for such things as responsibilities. I have a talent for only one thing in life--boring myself to death...
Wilson's fourth opus, The Piano Lesson, has already been produced at Yale. Like Joe Turner, it marries a naturalistic slice of life with mystic imagery. Set in 1936, it portrays a clan divided between struggling toward independence in the rural South and seeking a new life in the urban North, and it ends with a ritual exorcism. In a sense, all Wilson's plays are exorcisms, doomed but determined attempts to drive out the demons of memory. Says he: "The stigma of slavery is powerful. A few years ago, I went to a Passover service, and the first words...
Wilson says he has a "thing" about not going into rehearsal for one play < until the next is written. The night before Yale started staging Piano Lesson last October, he drafted the first scene of Two Trains Running, set in 1968. It is to play at Yale whenever Wilson can finish it, in between revisions on Piano Lesson and a screenplay for Fences to star Eddie Murphy...