Music

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Music, My back pages

Thibaudet Among the Philistines

February 5, 2011

Was looking forward to my first Jean-Yves Thibaudet last Wednesday at Carnegie Hall, but things got off to an unpromising start. A man who’d bought the orchestra seat next to mine arrived and barked, “Get that bag out of the way,” as if my briefcase and I had plotted some inconvenient coup. I take rudeness…

Current Affairs, Dance, Music, My back pages

Gladys Horton, lead singer of the Marvelettes, 1945-2011

January 30, 2011

Link: See them sing “Don’t Mess with Bill.” the-marvelettes-don-mess-with-1vwvs_2ey2h_.html They-Were-Great-Once Dept: the day Gladys Horton cajoled a few girlfriends into starting a singing group ultimately called the Marvelettes, they couldn’t have foreseen how happy they’d make a bunch of black kids growing up in Ohio. Their snappy, sexy melodies propelled a street-corner symphony heard around the…

Film, Music, Television, Theater

By Threes: Ellen Stewart 1919-2011; Margaret Whiting 1924-2011; David Nelson 1936-2011

January 15, 2011

Ellen Stewart with playwright Robert Patrick Margaret Whiting David Nelson

Film, Music, Television, Theater

Gloria Stuart 1910-2010, Eddie Fisher 1928-2010

September 27, 2010

Stuart, top, in The Invisible; Fisher, bottom, flanked by Elizabeth Taylor and Debbie Reynolds in what could be called the triangle of the century.

Current Affairs, Film, Music

Abbey Lincoln 1930-2010

August 14, 2010

Current Affairs, Gay, Music, Religion, Television, Theater

Feel the Rapture

June 3, 2010

Funny, forthright, bittersweet: none doesn’t quite describe Everyday Rapture, the lovely, not-quite one woman show starring Sherie Rene Scott at the Roundabout’s American Airlines Theater (what whores, the Roundabout, bartering naming rights for such a clunky moniker). Rapture is more than that quintessential show biz tale of a girl who makes it to New York…

Current Affairs, Film, Music, Television

Break on Through

May 13, 2010

Last night, caught The Doors: When You’re Strangeon PBS’s American Masters, Tom DiCillo’s wonderful, hippie-to-riches saga of the group that gave us L.A. Woman, Riders on the Storm, and every stoner’s lullaby, Light My Fire. Narrated by Johnny Depp, When You’re Strange tells a myriad tale—of Jim Morrison, a Midwesterner who succumbed to substance abuse the…

Film, Music, Politics, Race, Television, Theater

Lena Horne 1917-2010

May 11, 2010

Over the past few months we’ve suffered the loss of pioneers the likes of who we’ll never see again: Benjamin Hooks, Dorothy Height, and now Lena Horne: she certainly deserves a place alongside those lauded blacks activists if onlyl because one could chart the progress of black civil rights in this country through the trajectory…

Film, Music, Television, Theater

Dixie Carter 1939-2010

April 11, 2010

With husband Hal Holbrook at the Oscars…RIP

Criticals, Dance, Film, Music

Traffic Patterns

April 4, 2010

Published Attitude: The Dancer’s Magazine Summer 2010 In the late Eric Rohmer’s Love in the Afternoon, the film’s hero, Frederic, rhapsodizes about the city: “I love the city. The suburbs and the provinces depress me. Despite the crush and the noise, I never tire of plunging into the crowd; I love the crowd as I…