Word: songbooks
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...songbook is a museum basement of scattered treasures (she is trained in classical Japanese vocal techniques) and trash (she is also the world's most infamous banshee). Ono has long needed a curator, and in 2001 she gave a New Jersey duo called Orange Factory approval to go through her material and remix the 1970 innuendo-filled Open Your Box. "I'm a very difficult person," says Ono, "but when I heard it, I just thought it was beautiful. I cried...
After meeting with Dragone, O's director, and negotiating with three casinos and various producers, Angelil put together a deal at Caesars Palace. Then he and Dion stood back and let Dragone try to create a show out of Dion's songbook. "At first I did not know at all the repertoire of Celine," says Dragone. "I do not listen to this music. It's very pop-ish, so it is not so easy to find a tableau behind the songs. There is not a theme, except love of course...
...honest, I did not even know the people we went to kill," says Gerard Uwize, clutching a Bible and songbook. In 1994, Uwize joined a venomous swarm of Hutu militia that, with Rwandan government backing, unleashed hell against their Tutsi neighbors. In 100 days, using guns, machetes, clubs and spears, they slaughtered some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. And now Uwize and thousands of other killers are coming home. At the end of January Uwize, 37, walked out of a Kigali prison carrying a small green plastic bag containing his entire wardrobe and a sack filled with the odds...
...Vietnam" on Metallica's version of 53rd & 3rd as if he were auditioning for Oliver Stone, while Marilyn Manson, who once seemed a suitable heir to the Ramones (or at least Alice Cooper) turns The KKK Took My Baby Away into a bland bit of Goth melodrama. The Ramones' songbook demands energy and wit. Rancid gets the energy prize, flying through Sheena Is a Punk Rocker an inconceivable 58 seconds faster than the Ramones did, while Bono drops into a drolly perfect growl on U2's Beat on the Brat. But it's Kiss, the least credible contributing...
...minds of many Broadway traditionalists, the trend is unfortunate. They have a point. The peculiar magic of the musical form lies in convincing an audience that story and songs are an organic whole, that one can't live without the other. In most of the rock-songbook shows, the story is simply a clothesline on which to hang some presold hits the audience was humming on the way into the theater. Queen's We Are the Champions and Bohemian Rhapsody may or may not be your idea of great rock, but either way, in the college-revue tedium...