Word: songs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Cradle Song as a play has certain disadvantages. It is so unpretentious as to be unsuited to any production style less intimate than very small theater-in-the-round. In addition, it has virtually no plot. Playwrights Gregorio and Maria Martinez Sierra have merely chronicled two days eighteen years apart. In the first act, an unwanted infant girl is left on the doorstep of a convent of Dominican nuns, and the sisters decide to raise the child. In the second, the girl, now eighteen years old, is leaving the convent to get married. In terms of standard theatrical material, that...
...money Cradle Song is still a perfect gem of a play. The Sierras have used very few words from the dramatic alphabet, but with them they have managed to say a great many things about human nature. Indeed, the irrepressibility of human nature--of personality, of emotions, of love--seems to be the central theme of the play. The young girls in the convent have renounced worldly things, yet within the limits of monastic walls and rules their youthfulness and vitality burst forth in many ways--in girlish giggling, in writing poems, in squabbling with the other nuns. Most important...
With all these delicate shades of meaning, and with all the latent pathos of young girls confined to a convent, Cradle Song can be a wonderfully touching piece of theater. Its off-Broadway performances last winter at New York's Circle-in-the-Square brought handkerchiefs to the eyes of virtually the whole audience, male as well as female. But since the play is intimate and fragile, its emotional effect depends heavily on the skill and subtlety with which it is acted and directed. In this respect the current production at Tufts is only a partial success...
Convent life whirls on at a bewildeing pace and even the mother superior, in her show-stopping song, laments that she can barely keep up with it: "Oh, the very interior life of a Mother Superior/Is not so interior/It's veiled hysterier./The roofs need repairing/The budgets need paring/This pace is driving me wild./If I get to heaven it's because I made twenty-seven/First Fridays when I was a child...
...fans were quivering last week to the cacophonous cadences of a Gallicized rock-'n'-roll number named Dis-Moi Qu'Tu M'Aimes Rock (Tell Me That You Love Me Rock). Ostensibly written by a U.S. rock 'n' roller named Mig Bike, the song is actually the latest and loudest product of a reedy, bespectacled 24-year-old named Michel Legrand. Although the people who buy his records have only recently become aware that he exists, Composer-Conductor Legrand has in the last three years become one of the most successful popular musicians...