Word: pianos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Piano Lesson...
...Piano Lesson, play-wright August Wilson once again explores the rich dramatic territory of family resentment, memory and loss. It is a moving, haunted drama that travels from sadness to comedy with deftness and elegance. From a solid first act to a second act which approaches genius, Wilson combines a dazzling lyricism with a world-weary awareness of the unfair lot of Blacks in America--the same combination that won him a Pulitzer Prize as well as a Tony for his last outing, 1987's Fences...
...Huntington production is staged intelligently and sensitively by Wilson's longtime collaborator, Yale Repertory Director Lloyd Richards. The Piano Lesson, however, lacks cohesion. Wilson's material, as rich and compelling as it is, is too far-flung and perhaps too ambitious...
...only road to innovative programming. There are scores of neglected works by masters great and small that deserve dusting off. Instead of Dvorak's "New World" Symphony, for example, why not the equally seductive but infrequently heard tone poem, The Wood Dove? Instead of Beethoven's pawky Second Piano Concerto or the overplayed Violin Concerto of Mendelssohn, why not Rimsky-Korsakov's dashing Piano Concerto or Carl Nielsen's melancholic Violin Concerto? Instead of another Brahms' First Symphony, how about Joachim Raff's spooky "Lenore" Symphony, once greatly admired in the 19th century, or Austrian Composer Franz Schmidt's brooding...
Bruce Babbitt always seemed a most unlikely politician, even at his tiny high school in the mountains of northern Arizona. An A student with thick glasses, he dressed plainly and paid no heed to the '50s fashion for ducktail haircuts. He took piano lessons, served as an altar boy, and was voted "most courteous" in his 1956 yearbook. A friend recalls that Babbitt was too small for football, so he worked as the team's equipment manager, "and you know what kind of turkey that...