Word: sung
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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What attracts them is the same lure that brings steady crowds of tourists and local fans to the De Luxe Bocce Ball Court, a none-too-plush bar in San Francisco's Italian district: operatic arias and duets, spiritedly and sometimes expertly sung. Most performers are part-time professionals-old opera hands in semiretirement or music students who work and take lessons during the day, sing several nights a week at the bar. There is no honky-tonk hanky-pank at the Bocce; the men, in white shirts and black string ties, and the women, in flowered skirts...
This may be sheer bathos, but, as Catton points out, such songs were often sung by young soldiers who knew that their chances of seeing home again were poor. And The Union's effective performance (it is scored for soprano and baritone soloists, a combination that evokes the longing of both the women at home and the men in the field) rarely allows sentimentality to get out of hand...
...Broadway production of Benjamin Britten's Rape of Lucretia, but after the short-lived Rape closed, Tozzi wound up a penniless student in Italy (he recalls being so weak from hunger that he could climb to his third-floor room only once a day). Since then, he has sung widely in Europe, last summer toured as Emile de Becque with Mary Martin in South Pacific. A onetime baritone, Tozzi has a deep, warm voice in which much of the baritone quality persists, also has fine stage presence and plenty of humor (as he demonstrated as the Old Doctor...
High point of the show is a forlorn ballad sung by Lanky Blonde Ellen Hanley about a wan, straight-haired maiden who attends a meeting of an antique music society and trustingly goes home with a base-hearted fellow enthusiast...
...source of exuberance is that, rather than seeming sung or danced or chanted, a lot of production numbers seem spieled or shilled; they have a contagious carnival air, a ballyhoo rhythm. Opening with a jingly, jabbery railroad-car recitative of traveling salesmen, the show soon catapults Actor Preston into River City. There he first catches the town's eye with a kind of stylish evangelical pitch called Trouble, then clutches the town by the lapels with a rousing Seventy Six Trombones. Later in a gay, public-library ballet, Preston soft-shoes a hard sell of love-making...