Word: sound
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...audiences, the crucial but often unresearchable question is how a touring version measures up to its Broadway forerunner. Based on a sampling of half a dozen offerings, including two versions of Cats, the verdict is mostly favorable. Sets may be simpler, lighting more rudimentary, and the miked-up sound systems uniformly lousy. The more a show was shaped to fit a particular space and circumstances, the clumsier it looks shoehorned -- or stretched -- into a new configuration each week. But when it comes to performance pizazz, even second-string unknowns compete effectively with first-run counterparts -- and sometimes outdo them...
...local Indians. And out in the distance, along the blue horizons, the spouting of a distant whale. There, on a sunlit lawn high above the sea, a score of visitors assemble at first light. Retired schoolteachers, lay therapists, dentists from Ohio -- all move their limbs slowly, to the sound of a flute, through the Tai Chi motions of fire, water and gold...
...know hard times. They look sculpted from granite. They are sere with too much work, too little food and the knowledge that in 1920 in Matewan, W. Va., life is a bed of coal. Man and boy go into the mines and die; mother and wife wait for the sound of their men coming home, or for the fatal word that they won't. Life has pressed all hope out of these faces -- to smile would be a crime against remorseless nature -- though there is no free time for despair. The miners have been taught to accept their miserable...
...violent showpiece Smooth Criminal. The title track is Beat It redux, a spectacularly snazzy hang-tough tune that warns against macho excess. What the Thriller cut played for laughs, however, Smooth Criminal takes straight: an evocation of bloody assault, possible rape and likely murder. At any time, it would sound like a creepy song. At the end of the album, it has the effect of casting out all the optimism and willful idealism of Bad and Man in the Mirror and shrouding the record in a spooky, spiritual darkness. The piece is powerful, all right, but not perhaps...
...world of fantasy. It is not a fond farewell. "It's the choice that we make/ And this choice you will take/ Who's laughin' baby." The credits for Smooth Criminal read in part "Michael Jackson's heartbeat recording by Dr. Eric Chevlen digitally processed on the Synclavier." The sound of Jackson's heart may have found its way onto Bad, but what's inside it is unrevealed. Only one thing is certain: there is no peace there...