Word: pianos
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...apartment building is ailing as well. Once an elegant address on Manhattan's Upper West Side, it is now suffering from the not-so-benign neglect of the landlord. Margaret Mary's chief joy and solace is playing the piano, mostly Strauss and Chopin waltzes in tandem with a violin-playing "maiden lady" of about 50 named Cara Varnum (Dorothy Lou-don). Both actresses "fake" their instruments stylishly...
...birth trauma for a country just then emerging from isolationism into imperialism. Closeup: Emma Goldman, anarchist spellbinder, woos Evelyn Nesbit out of her petticoats and prejudices. Two-shot: Henry Ford and John Pierpont Morgan discuss reincarnation in the Morgan Library. A few chapters later, Coalhouse Walker Jr., a Negro piano player who dares to chart his own destiny as the two plutocrats did theirs, has seized the Morgan Library to avenge an outrage inflicted on his prized Model T. It is a splendid tale with sweeping images and passions, needing no dialogue-just the occasional flash of a newspaper headline...
Milos Forman seems to have understood this. The film's first shot focuses on a pair of black hands striding over piano keys, then pulls back to reveal a nickelodeon screen whose newsreel image is closing in on some machinery. Step back for the long shot; move in for the closeup. Distance and involvement, irony and sympathy. Working with Playwright Michael Weller, his collaborator on the 1979 film version of Hair, Forman concentrates on one main story and one subplot-Coalhouse Walker's rise to notoriety and Evelyn Nesbit's career as America's first...
...Miller has filled the disproportionate space with arches and arbors and many-tiered platforms. Playing on and around their stuccoed surfaces, the actors, for a welcome change, look at home. Instead of worrying that their gestures are dissipating in the vast emptiness, they just relax and lean on the piano...
Musical Evening--Priscilla Halberg, violin, and Lawrence Berman, piano; music of Handel, Mozart, Vitalli and Prokoflev; Peasant Stock Restaurant, 415 Washington St., Somerville...