Word: rhymed
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...fate which brings the pair together, O'Neill injected a good deal of power into the staggering plot. In a musical, however, you just don't explore the possibility of portraying the wickedness offered in the girl's career; you don't use fate except as a rhyme in a song; and above all you aren't gloomy. So all Abbott retains of the original is the elementary boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl structure; and that just isn't enough to drive the musical...
...improbable that Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov ever heard this cynical rhyme from the period when Australia was an English convict colony. But it might well have applied to the two Soviet citizens in 1954 when they left the service of the Russian secret police and were granted asylum in Australia. The story of the Petrovs-as they tell it themselves-is fascinating and informative on two counts. It gives a salutary refresher course in the feeding and breeding habits of the pestiferous swarm of Soviet agents at work outside Russia. And it gives a self-portrait of the "new" Soviet...
Cranks (by John Cranko; music by John Addison) is a pint-sized English revue with a Jeroboam's worth of frills. Three men and a girl squeal or kneel or sit with their backs to the audience, climb things while they rhyme things, weave about or dance or contort while singing ballads or blues. In a welter of shifting lights, one revue number slithers into the next while the performers act as their own stagehands...
...book follows the original's satiric story line but kills its spirit by relentless pursuit of the obvious gag, the single entendre, the rhyme-at-any-cost; e.g., "The air is full of your infidelities," sings Juno. "No? The hell it is," rhymes Jupiter in one of the better couplets. And so it goes, with garter-Sparta, Hades-ladies, loony-Juny (for Juno), until the elegantly frothy music is almost lost between the heavy text and the embarrassed sighs of the audience. Most remarkable fact of all: the man who managed thus to combine the theatrical naivete...
...prescribed period style of the fifties, compounded of all the personal styles available ; but he no longer borrows whole lines, as for his first volumes, or even half-lines. It is a word here, a rhythm there, a rhetorical trope, a simile, an ingenious rhyme, a classical reference, a metrical arrangement...