Word: roles
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Niro brings formidable energy and intensity to Jimmy's goofball streak, his sulks, his frustrated rage. But the rea son such a character, as written, should interest us remains as elusive as the Lost Chord. De Niro is unable to move the role beyond the capsule description by the bandleader (played by Big Band Vet eran Georgie Auld, who also supplies the sax solos on the sound track) who first hires Jimmy. "Jimmy plays a barrelful of sax," says the leader, "but he's a top pain...
...best example of this kind of attack is Trilling's response to the furor created last spring when her original publisher refused to go ahead with the book unless Trilling removed some remarks about Lillian Hellman in an essay defending American liberals' role in the anticommunist movement of the '50s. (A classic liberal, Trilling considers communism a terrible danger. In a 1967 essay included in this volume, she says the war in Vietnam is a serious error, not because it represents American aggression, but because it is not the best way to stop the Red Menace.) Trilling refused to comply...
...that "codes for the guidance of our moral lives are constantly being proposed for us by the culture even where the social standards which are being invoked seem most precisely to prohibit recourse to moral criteria." What she is saying, through her murky prose, is that in her critical role she seeks primarily to offer some moral guidance, even if her criteria seem totally at odds with everyday reality. Which explains, of course, her willingness to make moral judgments about anything in her essays without really explaining how she reaches her conclusions; she feels fully justified in offering unsubstantiated opinion...
Reportedly the title role was not in the best hands in Connecticut, and the part has been taken over here by Susan Watson, who turns out to have been a wise choice. I never saw any performance by the legendary Helen Morgan, for whom the part was tailored, but she must have had some kind of talent to have inspired such widespread adulation. I am, however, familiar with Morgan's singing, which I have always thought much overrated: her voice had a rapid, almost bleating tremolo, which I found unattractive...
...secure, and her diction clear. Like many singers, she has a tendency not to hold the last notes of phrases to their full value, but hers is lovely vocalism all the same. And she is no stranger to the style of the 1920's, since she created the title role in the 1971 Broadway revival of No. No. Nanette...