Word: scotto
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...that a star dancer (the gorgeous Fredi Washington) is feeling ill before she goes on for a fatal final number. Fred Waller directed Ellington's Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life (1934) with artful lighting of black laborers, and moody shadows caressing the young Billie Holiday. Aubrey Scotto set most of A Rhapsody in Black and Blue (1932) in a cleaning man's dream kingdom, Jazzmania, where Armstrong scats among soap bubbles and disappears into a whirlpool of multiple exposures...
...Scotto could be the D.W. Griffith of musical shorts, not so much for his story-telling vigor as for his love of racial stereotypes. He bedecks Armstrong in a leopard-skin tunic, harem pants and body glitter; he urges his black actors to grimace grotesquely and gives them fearful patois to spout ("I run until I's black in de face," says a man fleeing a Latin American revolt in the 1931 Be Like Me). He was not alone in caricaturing African Americans. Crosby, whose crooner inflections owed much to black musicians, wears blackface in the 1932 Dream House...
...spectacular (Irish actor Barry McGovern in I'll Go On, a mordant one-man show derived from three novels by Samuel Beckett) to the mediocre (Hans Werner Henze's tired exercise in late-'50s avant-gardism, Der Prinz von Homburg) to the risible (the washed-up soprano Renata Scotto singing the role of the Marschallin in Richard Strauss's opera Der Rosenkavalier). Still, Spoleto seems on course to become one of the nation's most important and enjoyable arts events...