Word: forebears
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...City Hall. The film harks back a decade or two to the days when New York pols with great names--Meade Esposito, Stanley Steingut--swaggered toward a dread destiny. The bad guys in City Hall are in that mold: princes of darkness, Borgias of Brooklyn. The movie's obvious forebear is The Godfather, which apotheosized the dirty dealings of statesmen and Mafiosi in the richly upholstered, 10-watt throne room of Hades...
...Lloyd Webber's best score, but it is his most seamlessly and artfully constructed. There is a resemblance between this show and The Phantom of the Opera -- reclusive mad protagonist conceives passion for young member of opposite sex -- but that is merely plot. Musically, Sunset's real forebear is Evita. The angular, chromatic recitatives for Norma explicitly recall Eva Peron's egocentric ravings. If the music of the new show lacks Aspects' delicious subtleties and Phantom's gothic flamboyance, it still offers two of Lloyd Webber's best songs in With One Look and As If We Never Said Goodbye...
Bayreuth has always been run by a Wagner, and now it is Richard's grandson Wolfgang, 75, who is in charge. As skilled a manager as his forebear, possessing just as combative and strife-prone a temperament, Wolfgang is the most visible person at the festival. He also conducts one of the behind-the- scenes highlights at Bayreuth, the press conference that follows a new production. This year he outdid himself in grouchy garrulity. Ignoring the journalists' humble need to get quotes from all major participants, he grabbed the mike and answered questions addressed to Rosalie or Alfred Kirchner...
...Rowen is the overarching presence, a character of macho force, demonic glee and utmost energy -- so awe-inspiring that his battered son says the only way he could be killed is if a mountain fell on him. The last Rowen is undone by doubt, destroyed by the conscience his forebear so happily lacked. In between Keach plays a sharecropper who plots vengeance on his landlord for more than four decades before finally regaining his homestead, and that man's son, who deals his birthright away to a slick-talking tale spinner for the Rockefeller energy interests...
...show, Putting It Together, is loosely conceived as a party at which old flames flicker and new ones spark. To quote Sondheim's nearest intellectual forebear, Cole Porter, what a swell party it is. With new material from Sondheim, designs by three Tony winners, choreography by Bob Avian (A Chorus Line, Miss Saigon) and a cast headed by Julie Andrews in her first New York stage appearance since Camelot in 1961, the show seems absurdly overabundant for its venue, a nonprofit house seating 299. But then, impresario Cameron Mackintosh (Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables) has been showing up night...