Word: showâ
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...Oklahoma their timeless, almost mythic quality. Yet that is not to say South Pacific is any less adventurous or innovative. This is a show in which the central love story - between Navy nurse Nellie Forbush and the middle-aged French plantation owner Emile de Beque - along with the show???s big love ballad, are basically disposed of in the very first scene. The rest of the show is an exploration of that relationship, an unraveling of backstory, the placing of it in the context of everything else that is going on in the play, and the world...
...Mostly they escape through song, and it?s wondrous to see and hear the over-familiar melodies and lyrics in context again. ?Some Enchanted Evening?, which always struck me as the stodgiest of the big R&H love ballads, becomes an affecting, shape-shifting reflection of the show???s emotional movement, from the joy of love-at-first-sight to the rueful foreshadowing of love lost. Even the seemingly simple lyrics of ?A Wonderful Guy? glide from ironic detachment to full-throated romanticism with deceptive wit and charm...
Inside, the cavernous space (which includes a huge bar, for one night only) has been decked out not for clowns and acrobats but for a fashion show???one far bigger than those usually staged in Paris, Milan and New York. While the 94 models walking the runway are all habitués of those venues, not one face in the front row at this show (make that shows?five of them back-to-back, with a break for supper) is familiar to anyone who frequents the fashion circuit...
Alice Munro spins tales that show??us, again and again, and with wondrous grace, how much can be done in a simple short story. Yet the 74-year-old Canadian does it by breaking every rule ever taught in a writing seminar, setting up a master class along the sidelines. Her latest--her 11th--collection of stories, The View from Castle Rock (Knopf; 349 pages), marks a departure from her usual examinations of women in rural Canada leaving home to remake their possibilities by drawing instead on family documents, historical records (from 19th century Scotland) and what feels like memoir...
They must have been hoping for the G.O.P. to put on a good show???good enough, anyway, to drown out the din over their own troubles. ?By William R. Doemer...