Word: singeing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...chorus, known as Les Cagelles, mostly men in drag but with a few women, is something of a wonder as well. "You'll find it tough guessing our gender," they sing at the beginning, and half the fun is telling one sex from the other. David Engel, for example, was a football player in the film of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. In La Cage he is Hanna from Hamburg, a blond beauty with a taste for sadomasochism. "A stagehand in Boston saw me in my wig, leotards and whip," says Engel, "and said, 'Honey...
...sing of warfare and a man at war." Fitzgerald's version of The Aeneid's first words ("Arma virumque cano") veers sharply away from the traditional reading in English, enshrined in the title of George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man. Yet singing of arms and the man was not all that Virgil's fellow Romans in the 1st century B.C. would have understood him to mean. They had already been thoroughly schooled on who Aeneas was and what he had, in legend, accomplished; neither his identity nor his military prowess could have been...
Tastes change; each era meets the classics on new ground. At the approach of the 18th century, John Dryden offered Virgil as a master of the heroic couplet: "Arms, and the man I sing, who, forced by Fate,/ And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate." During the Victorian era, Aeneas emerged in the English of William Morris and other writers as a Romantic brooder well versed in Wordsworth's Ode to Duty. Fitzgerald's version, a century hence, may seem equally dated. But if translations capture the essence of their culture, then this Aeneid, in its supple beauty...
...modesty in Ira. For a 1959 collection of his lyrics, he wrote that "any resemblance to actual poetry, living or dead, is highly improbable." True, when printed on the naked page. But dressed in a sumptuous refrain and delivered by the right performer, Ira's lyrics could sing like sonnets...
...sister Adele. Other stars soon recognized a good thing. Gertrude Lawrence sang Someone to Watch over Me in Oh, Kay! (1926); in Girl Crazy (1930), young Ginger Rogers sang But Not for Me and Embraceable You, and Ethel Merman razed the roof with I Got Rhythm. Of Thee I Sing (1931) won Ira the first Pulitzer Prize for a lyricist. For George's crowning triumph, Porgy and Bess (1935), Ira contributed about half of the lyrics (the others were by DuBose Heyward). The brothers repeated their success in Hollywood, especially with Fred Astaire: Shall We Dance included They...