Word: pianos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Sweeney is surely a difficult show to put on. Stephen Sondheim's often dissonant, virtually non-stop score, is hard enough to sing, but Music Director David Gregg increases his singers' burden by backing them with only a piano and a synthesizer. Fortunately, the actors and the large chorus are up to the task, though Talenti and Carter occasionally fall flat on Sondheim's melodically meandering ballads...
Sondheim's fascination with the theater reaches back to a day in 1939 when his father took Stephen, 9, to see a Broadway musical, Very Warm for May. He recalls, "The curtain went up and revealed a piano. A butler took a duster and brushed it up, tinkling the keys. I thought that was thrilling." That moment, a few months before his parents' divorce, was one of the few distinctly happy ones from a latchkey childhood: "I did not have an unhappy time, because it literally did not occur to me that other people had a family life...
...East Side enclave of houses that share a sprawling back garden with low brick walls, small fountains and mossy enclosures. Katharine Hepburn resides next door, but they did not meet until nearly a decade after he moved in. "I was up one night at about 3, pounding on the piano, writing The Ladies Who Lunch for Company, when I heard this banging on the garden door. There she was, in a babushka and no shoes, saying, 'Young man, I cannot sleep with the noise you're making.' Now she and my houseman, Lou Vargas, swap recipes, and she brings...
Late at night a college radio station discourses brilliantly on Rachmaninoff's piano technique. Whole regions, with accents and traditions and communities of their own, come in over the air, echoes of reality in the netherworld...
...shows usually offer a variety of delights: Lily Tomlin and Whoopi Goldberg impersonated scores of different women; Victor Borge played the piano between monologues. Jackie Mason is only Jackie Mason, a hunched and tuneless figure towering some 5 ft. 4 in. above sea level and speaking with the Yiddish locutions of an immigrant who just completed a course in English. By mail. His targets are ecumenical. On Jews and Christians: "You show a gentile carrots and peas, he eats carrots and peas. You show a Jew carrots and peas: 'Wait a minute. Why are there so many carrots compared...