Word: septets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Musically Phantom is at once more sophisticated and less hummably memorable than most of Lloyd Webber's shows. There is no song to compare with Memory in Cats. Instead there are sequences that verge on opera, the most ambitious being a quasi-Mozartian septet. Unfortunately, the wit and scholarship of his tunes are nowhere echoed in Hart's lyrics, which oscillate between the banal and the impenetrable...
...sets, costumes and gestures. "Didn't think it was much of a story," Bob says bluntly, and he is as cheerfully caustic to his regular customers. His goal is to buy his own snack shop or maybe even a small restaurant-nightclub where the Great Pacific Jazz Band, the septet he has led from his piano for 20 years, can play. These days, they've got a regular Sunday gig in Encino. Sometimes Molly drops by to sing...
...obscenity. But to say this is to assume that Mamet's ear-to-the-gutter dialogue is naturalistic. It is not. This is street slang refined and extended into the surreal, the baroque, the abrasive, the lyrical. And as spoken in blazing ricochet rhythms by his energized septet of actors-especially Mantegna, Prosky and Lane Smith as a harried customer who comes close to emotional collapse-Mamet's absurdist riffs almost make sense...
Jerome Robbins, the company's other master choreographer, took a shrewd course of action: instead of struggling with a long, note-ridden work, he picked out some small pieces and came up with Four Chamber Works, a winner, even though it has a rough start. Musically, Septet is a droning harangue, and Robbins' setting looks like a Balanchine copybook. The most ambitious sequence is a pas de trois for three very strong dancers, Merrill Ashley, Sean Lavery and Mel Tomlinson. Sleek, vigorous, boldly plastic, it is a kind of message to portentous choreographers like Glen Tetley and Choo...
...Thomas Professor of the History of Science, plans to re-read Michel Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge and plow through a tome or two of Sartre and Flaubert. But for an undergraduate not necessarily interested in chasing the history of science on every lazy afternoon, he chooses this septet, including three books by colleagues...