Word: songe
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hero's main feat of derring-do is to pose as a plague victim so all the villains will flee in fear. Yet Wildhorn's music has enough muscle and melody to lift the material and the spirits. He can get our blood flowing with a rousing fight song (Into the Fire in Pimpernel) or brighten a brittle critique of social mores with an infectious melodic motif (Facade in Jekyll). Even when his ballads bog down in gooey lyrics (by Leslie Bricusse in Jekyll; Nan Knighton in Pimpernel), the simple but affecting tunes can stick with you. And if they...
Pimpernel followed a similar course, with a concept album and a Top 40 single (You Are My Home) before reaching the stage. Wildhorn gets positively woozy about the way his music affects audiences: aids patients write to thank him for the inspiration they get from A New Life, a song from Jekyll & Hyde. And as for those critics? Friends send him copies of early bad reviews of Puccini and Verdi operas to make him feel better. "There's a tendency to get bitter and cynical, but I'm not going to do that," he says. "I've got too much...
DIED. ELIOT DANIEL, 89, tunemeister who composed the upbeat theme song for I Love Lucy; in Los Angeles. Convinced the wacky sitcom would tank, Daniel initially asked that his name not appear in the credits...
When Marcus Roberts titles an album Blues for the New Millennium (Columbia), it's no casual gesture. Having played regularly with Wynton Marsalis, the pianist shares with his former bandleader a taste for pedagogy, historicism and sheer ambition. Roberts' two most recent albums were a song cycle about romantic loss and rebirth, and a jazzman's reclamation of Rhapsody in Blue. The new disc begins with basics--covers of Robert Johnson and Jelly Roll Morton--and then branches out with 12 self-penned numbers. The climax, Roberts writes, "symbolizes what the whole record is about...our belief that jazz (blues...
...version tries to address these concerns. Playwright Wendy Kesselman (My Sister in This House) has done a thorough reworking, including material from the expanded edition of the diary published in 1991 (with most of the material restored that Frank had deleted), adding more Jewish references (a Hanukkah song is sung in Hebrew) and in general giving the play a less sentimental, more astringent tone. "I thought it was crucial to bring out the darker side," says Kesselman...