Word: staging
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...friendly hermit known only as Man in Chair (co-author Bob Martin) slips a 33-1/3 rpm record out of its sleeve and tells us we are about to hear A 1928 musical called guess what. In a trice, the gent's apartment is converted into a Broadway stage and the musical is performed, with Man in Chair's frequent interpolations on the biographies of the stars. It's all faux, you know, and as directed by Casey Nicolaw (who choreographed Spamalot) the evening has an airy confidence worthy of the old shows...
...show, assembled by that preeminent scholar of Broadway music, Robert Kimball, had some nice arcana, like Mercer's rejected lyric for a Harold Arlen tune that, thanks to Ira Gershwin, became "The Man That Got Away." And at the end, one of Mercer's most important interpreters came on stage: Margaret Whiting, still a pistol at 81. The night I attended, she went dry on some lyrics to "One for My Baby," then won the audience back by muttering, in her best saloon-chanteuse alto, "Of all the songs to blow, it had to be this...
...audience, of which an estimated 80% were older than I am (and I've been humming these songs for 50 years or more), was indulgent, enthralled, in the moment - at once in the present and the beloved past. When an on-stage screen flashed the lyrics to "Moon River," almost everyone sang along, in tribute to Mercer, their huckleberry friend, and to the avid consumers of great pop music they all, we all, were...
...little they knew - the play relates the machinations of political bosses to get its man, John Wintergreen (here, Broadway veteran Victor Garber), into the White House. Bereft of ideas or ideals, they take the advice of a chambermaid and run on a platform of Love. Their scheme is to stage an Atlantic City beauty contest and marry off the winner, a Southern honeypot named Diana Devereaux (wowser Jenny Powers), to the bachelor Wintergreen. The candidate, though, has fallen for his secretary, Mary Turner (Jennifer Laura Thompson, fresh from playing Glinda the Good Witch in Wicked). The John-loves-Mary affair...
When Monday night’s launch party reached a size slightly less than that of the Senate Democratic caucus, Fink took center stage and announced the winners of the “First Annual Dem Apples Awards.” (Dem Apples is the official blog of the Harvard Dems). The prizes, naturally, came in the form of apples painted blue. Fink gave out about half a dozen of them, one for “Best Republican-Lite,” for instance, and another for best use of profanity. The latter went to Markus R.T. Kolic...