Word: show
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Music in 1932 opened a rich new vein of melody. Depression America fought off the gathering gloom with the cheery bounce of Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee. For the first-act finale of As Thousands Cheer (1933), he dusted off an old clinker called Smile and Show Your Dimple, put a new bonnet on it and called it Easter Parade. Two years later, it was on to Hollywood, where Berlin wrote many of the tunes that sent % Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers flying into celluloid legend. Back on Broadway in 1946, he achieved his greatest success with Annie...
...sparrow of a man who always had trouble sleeping and could never sit still, Berlin worked at a furious pace. During a production conference for Annie Get Your Gun, it was decided that the show needed another song, so the composer rushed home. Six minutes later, the show's director got a phone call. "Listen to this," said Berlin, who launched into the first verse of Anything You Can Do. He had written it in the taxi...
...last show was Mr. President (1962), a failure. But he continued to pick out tunes just the same. "The question is," he would ask rhetorically, "are you going to be a crabby old man or are you going to write another song?" He watched his parade of birthdays go by quietly, embarrassed by the fuss made by the world at large. Though fans gathered outside his Manhattan town house for a 100th birthday serenade, he was unimpressed with his longevity. "Age," he observed, "is no mark of merit unless you do something constructive with it." What he did was indisputable...
...human terms, at the primal level of the G.I. helpless within the compound and the woman he pledged to marry trapped outside. Miss Saigon, from the creators of Les Miserables, is too long and wayward, unevenly acted and loaded with cliches. But the failings hardly matter because the show takes on a powerful subject, explores it without easy answers and ends in true tragedy -- disaster wrought by those who meant only to help...
...best of thankless parts, although his pitch and accent wobble while she sings gloriously. Jonathan Pryce is deliciously campy yet sympathetic as the Engineer, a Eurasian pimp evocative of the emcee in Cabaret. In Salonga, a star is born. Playing a plaster saint, she is stunningly real. But the show's final moments are so bleak that despite an $8 million advance, its future may not be assured. Some downers, like Les Miz, are at heart ups. This one is only a down...