Word: showing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With a cast that features opera stars Frederica von Stade (Magnolia), Teresa Stratas (Julie) and Jerry Hadley (Ravenal), as well as a cameo appearance by Lillian Gish as the Lady on the Levee, this Show Boat aims high. "Show Boat was thought of as a dusty operetta, but it is really a moving piece of music drama," says conductor John McGlinn, 35, whose passion for the score drove him to record the Mississippi riverboat musical in its complete 1927 version. McGlinn restored the overture, reinstating three important ensemble numbers and, most controversially, insisting on Hammerstein's original dialogue, which includes...
...recordings have been as musically successful as Show Boat. In West Side Story, Carreras' Hispanic accent was as wrong for the role of the New Yorker Tony as Te Kanawa's British inflection was for the Latino Maria. In South Pacific, the casting of tenor Carreras, in the role created by bass Ezio Pinza, was a bit of commercialism that necessitated transposing the part and ended up distorting the balance. Further, imagining the New Zealand-born Te Kanawa as an all-American Nellie Forbush was a greater suspension of disbelief than many listeners were willing to make. Yet My Fair...
...Broadway shows, however, do not have to be cast with opera stars to be taken seriously. What they have to be first is respected. "There are great theater pieces of the teens, '20s and '30s that don't exist in performable form," laments McGlinn. "If a show closed out of town, the scores could be thrown out on the last night. A lot of pre-Oklahoma! Rodgers and Hart, Porter and Kern shows are gone forever. We're trying to reclaim from oblivion all the work of America's greatest writers and composers...
Fish got to swim, birds got to fly: the best composers will always write seriously, even when they are frankly dressing their tunes for success. The move from Broadway to opera house -- from quotidian show to stage classic, in other words -- is well under way. The only difference is that now people are finally catching...
Still, his opponents are gaining ground. Last week a Washington Post poll indicated that 49% of probable voters favored the gun law, compared with 44% who opposed it. Following the N.R.A.'s recent success defeating a gun bill in Congress, a victory in Maryland would show that the powerful lobby can blow away gun control even when it gets past a legislature...