Word: purists
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...friend the classics purist is upset that the Classical Club's production of Sophokles' tragedy Aias doesn't have an all-male cast, as it did during its original run. But Aias isn't the Hasty Pudding show, I answer--although the overactors in this play rival the Pudding's in the way they exaggerate their characters to the point of comic caricature...
...surprisingly, Odysseus is a bit incredulous when Athena (Leta Fincher) explains it all to him. For a goddess of wisdom, Fincher's Athena seems unduly bloodthirsty, even going so far as to chide Odysseus for his timid revulsion. She's supposed to be that way, says my friend the purist, but this Athena revels in the bloodshed so much that she would horrify Lady Macbeth...
Following that purist philosophy, he dislikes such popular favorites as Linda Ronstadt (he actually sneers when he mentions her name), Frank Sinatra ("too hip for me") and Ella Fitzgerald. "Unquestionably a beautiful voice," he says of Ella, "but I never got a sense she connected with the lyrics. She never churned my kishkes -- that's Yiddish for intestines." His list of favorites is just as idiosyncratic. It includes Minnelli, of course, but also Rosemary Clooney ("she does everything a singer should do"), Gogi Grant ("she has an emotional intensity and is much underrated") and Martha Raye ("her voice was like...
Occasionally, the earnest musical-comedy style of the singing and dancing threatens to overwhelm the material, and a purist friend tells me that the house pianist was way off throughout. So, purists take note. For the rest of us it's a cast of dreamboats and high-power honeys singin' the kind of songs that heaven sings when its feelin' blue. So to speak...
...schlock-schlock goes, Joshuais a downer. But then, when it comes to trash, I'm a purist...