Word: sung
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Rugantino, a musical transported intact from Rome and sung and spoken in Italian, is a pleasant novelty on Broadway. Unobtrusive English titles are flashed on a narrow screen above the stage to keep the playgoer abreast of action and dialogue. More nearly an operetta than a musical comedy, Rugantino is lavishly and attractively costumed and atmospherically set in Rome in 1830. Its bawdry is innocent, its humor earthy, its love songs are unselfconsciously sentimental...
...Bullfights. Fados sound like torch songs sung from the top of a mosque: sobs, wails, cries from the soul. Even when performed by as dulcet a fadista as Amália, they are more forlorn than a foghorn, more despairing than a moan. Fado means destiny in Portuguese, and the Weltschmerz of a good fado gets a physical grip on its audience; like "ffillie Holiday's blues, fados encourage a state of mind well beyond the reach of popular music...
...Portuguese seem eager to have their hearts broken. "A wild group of students can roar into a tavern," a medical student says wonderingly, "and immediately they become despondent, wailing their favorite fado." Positive-thinking Portuguese try unsuccessfully to combat this downbeat sense of life; if such songs must be sung, a Portuguese intellectual has urged, "let us suffer en famille and avoid letting foreigners think we have invented a new kind of yawn...
Fado's dark charms are, indeed, perceivable beyond Portugal. Amália has sung in New York and Hollywood, made a dozen successful visits to Bra zil and just finished a triumphant engagement in Mexico City. But back home, her spell is so strong that she easily persuades Portugal's leading intellectuals and composers to write songs for her, thus taking the national art form from the hands of the dejected lovers and sentimental ladies who anonymously contribute most fado lyrics...
...sung three times with the New York Philharmonic and has cut albums of everything from works of Bach and Villa-Lobos to South Pacific and The Mother Magoo Suite. She has lived most of her life in the Hollywood area and has been a singer since she was ten, when, as Margaret Nixon Mc-Eathron, she won a contest with a smooth Blue Danube at the Pomona State Fair. At 17, she quit high school to work as a messenger at MGM, soon got her first $35 dubbing job as the singing voice of Margaret O'Brien. The Instant...