Word: singed
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This takes inconceivable effort, since making Shaw dull is rather like making sex dull. Shaw's words sing; this cast singsongs, and a woodpecker on a hollow log would have produced a more tuneful score. Richard Kiley's Caesar has faint, weary traces of Shaw's philosopher-king, but Leslie Uggams is a drowned kitten of the Nile without a hint of incipient regality...
...through enough acrobatics to wear out more than 100 costumes a year. Their voices-Sam's higher and more cutting, Dave's huskier and darker-toned-blend robustly in mournful, harmonized wails or fervent gospel-style shouts. And their listeners respond like converts at a revival meeting. "Sing it, Sam!" they yell, or "I hear you, Dave; good God, I hear...
...State College. By year's end, their 35-member troupe will have played enough college and town dates to gross around $1,500,000. Wherever they stop, they give completely. "We simply try to do a little more than required," says Sam. "If this means we have to sing one song for 50 minutes, then we sing the song for 50 minutes." That may seem terribly long, but when Sam & Dave pound out Hold on, I'm Comin', even 50 minutes seem too short for the fans...
...highly dissonant background. In the haunting second part, the name Martin Luther King is recited and sung over and over again, the syllables spilled out here, squeezed there, so that the name is uttered in an endless variety of permutations. In the impassioned third section, the vocalists speak and sing excerpts from Beckett's The Unnamable, swatches from James Joyce, even slogans that were scribbled on the walls of the Sorbonne during last May's student insurrection. All the while, the orchestra plays a convoluted version of the third movement from Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony, as snippets...
Carolyn Leaf, however, did the loveliest work of the evening. Her animated film of Peter and the Wolf, done in black sand, was beautiful, alive, and truly elegant. The movie absorbs the idiom of story and music to sing the terror of the wolf and the forest, and the pathos of the animals that are eaten...