Word: singed
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This week the Tufts Arena offers their best production so far this season, a splendid rendition of "Sing Out, Sweet Land." Walter Kerr's allegorical eroica, extolling man's universal quest for freedom, couched in specific American terms, is a kind of musical biography of the American idiom. A cavalcade of American folk songs from the colonial days to Gershwin interspersed with a narrative biography of American history chronicle the development of the American idiom...
...precocious teen-age pupil of Murder Inc.'s Louis ("Lepke") Buchalter, urbane, well-tailored Iceberg Johnny Dio, 43 (real name: Dioguardi), was belatedly packed off for a three-year stretch at Sing Sing by Racket Buster Tom Dewey in 1937. The charge: extorting protection money from garment district truckers and cloak-and-suiters. Long out of stir and prospering by 1950, Dio became a smoother thug, refined his old muscle technique to set up "paper locals" (no rights, few members), shook down businessmen with threats of "labor violence" and picketing. So powerful grew "Mr. Dee" that two months...
...that language is what its users make of it. It is usually Critic Brown who is the first to cry Fowler. Both quick-witted, the two men also strike sparks with contrasting personalities: stocky Evans, 52, often rides roughshod over the conversation with a donnish cackle and a rapid, sing-song voice that strikes some listeners like chalk drawn across a blackboard; lean, white-haired Brown, 57, a veteran lecturer and darling of women's clubs, is a courtly Kentuckian with effortless charm...
Gable was a Yankee sea captain in the "nigger business." but has now repented of his slave-trading ways, and settled down as a Spanish-mossbacked Southern gentleman whose vassals are so happy that they all mass by ol' man river to sing hallelujah whenever Gable's steamboat comes round the bend. Yvonne is also cooing Gable's glory, though in more intimate circumstances. The trouble comes from Sidney Poitier, a pampered boss Negro whom Gable raised as a son; Sidney has turned bitter, would like nothing better than to plant kindly Massa Clark...
...chief virtue of the production is a cast of exceptionally high-quality voices which is agreeably suited to comic opera. Unfortunately, the acting is not always so successful, at least it is not up to the calibre of the singing. In the title roles of the two primi gondolieri and pretenders to the throne of Barataria, Bruce Macdonald and George Brown both sing remarkably well and elicit a great deal of satire from their acting. Neither of the pair strikes one as of the gondoliering or the regal type, but this only serves to heighten the humor...