Word: singings
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...final scene is its saddest and wisest. On Delacroix Island, at the mouth of the Mississippi, we meet Irvan and Allen Perez, two cousins who belong to the Islenos, a Spanish-speaking people who first settled in Louisiana 200 years ago. The Perezes are fishermen. As they work, they sing slow, bittersweet a cappella songs called decimas--10-stanza numbers, mostly in Spanish, that tell the stories of their lives and communities. They sing of shrimp boats and muskrat trappers, bad weather and home mortgages. Their voices are piercing and pure. Allen sings...
...fake ferret. Do you know what that means? Again, the press release speaks through me. Basically there are a lot of people on stage, no one is particularly charming or memorable, they do ridiculous things for adults under uninspired direction and the audience laps it up. They sing competently, okay, even well, but they dance tepidly. And the premise of the show, the reason for this massive bouffanted brouhaha, is, like, let's have a nineteenth century variety show, because it's that time of the year which lends itself so perfectly to all things excessive and unnecessary...
...Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti, whose "Three Tenors" concerts with Jose Carreras are the most profitable road show in the modern history of classical music. It has been more than a decade since the Metropolitan Opera gave an opening-night performance without one or the other performing. But few tenors sing past 60, and both men are fast approaching the inevitable end of their dual tenure at the top of the operatic heap...
...planning to do when Pavarotti and Domingo are no longer available to open the season, and the first name he mentions is that of Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel. "At some point," he confides, "we're going to open with a Don Giovanni starring Bryn." No, Terfel can't sing a high C, but Volpe is betting that won't matter. "Bryn's the one who has all of the goods," he says. "He's the natural successor." A charismatic actor with a voice of bronze, Terfel, 33, also has the popular touch without which no classical singer can become...
...usual material for a Broadway musical--but don't scoff. Director Harold Prince has taken other unlikely subjects, from Sweeney Todd to Evita Peron, and made them sing onstage. And book author Alfred Uhry (whose great-uncle was Leo Frank's boss) has been able to turn the crosscurrents of race and religion in the South into mass entertainment before (Driving Miss Daisy, The Last Night of Ballyhoo). Indeed, Parade, which just opened at Lincoln Center, is the kind of ambitious musical that can sometimes soar to greatness. It certainly takes a healthy bite out of a juicy story...