Word: wordless
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Sentimental Thing" is a lovely ballad, in which Jackson wisely plays with lyrical lines of unequal lengths and correspondingly non-correspondent meters. The instrumental bridge is a string quartet; the coda is also counched in lush strings, with Askew contributing a haunting, wordless "Madame Butterfly" type aria. This segues into an instrumental, "Acropolis Now," which begins promisingly as a hybrid between '80s rock and Greek folk guitar, but it begins to maunder soon after and degenerates into a fairly close approximation of a jam session by a forgotten, early '70s band. The side closes with the title track, which reverses...
...other hand, the whimsical Siamese retelling of Uncle Tom's Cabin from The King and I seems stately and slow. The Russian peasant life in Fiddler on the Roof looks even cornier and campier when deprived of the original's glints of fear and oppression. A protracted, wordless street scene among customers of a speakeasy is unlikely to bring back Billion Dollar Baby. And a danced duet from High Button Shoes, cast with vigorous young performers, defeats the whole sentimental purpose of the original number: to demonstrate that a married couple well along into middle age can not only remain...
...minute work for a speaking actor and small ensemble of synthesizers, amplified winds and wordless soprano voice, 1000 Airplanes resurrects the hoary genre of the melodrama. As a musical term, melodrama refers to a composition in which one or more actors recite to musical accompaniment. Schubert's world-weary Abschied von der Erde and Ralph Vaughan Williams' radiant An Oxford Elegy are examples...
...defiance of the "rules" of drama, Wilder kills off half a dozen characters without offering even one juicy onstage death scene, and the mourners are limited to one wordless gesture and one choked cry. Although the play appears to celebrate the tender bonds of family and community, the beauty of human connection is all but unseen: real self-awareness comes in monologue or in rueful exchanges among the shades of characters already dead. In the climax, a young woman who has died in childbirth revisits earth on the day of her twelfth birthday, only to find that her mother cannot...
...suggests. While filming his movie, for example, Cosby heard Ray Charles' recording of It's Not Easy Being Green. He asked the show's writers to build an episode around the song. Result: in one of this fall's segments, a sulking Rudy goes into her room for a wordless sequence set to Charles' music. Many of Cosby's ideas are the merest kernels of plots, which a staff of six writers must work to flesh out into 30-minute episodes. "We're concerned about structure," says one writer, Gary Kott. "But if Bill has an idea for a scene...