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Don Basilio
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« Reply #60 on: 14:52:17, 26-05-2008 » |
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I am pretty sure I saw Bertice Reading singing Stormy Weather in the Derek Jarman film of The Tempest when it first came out.
Anty, I hope I did not drive you to this desperate measure. Let us know how it was for you.
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To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh: a time to mourn, and a time to dance
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Antheil
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« Reply #61 on: 14:57:40, 26-05-2008 » |
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I am pretty sure I saw Bertice Reading singing Stormy Weather in the Derek Jarman film of The Tempest when it first came out.
Anty, I hope I did not drive you to this desperate measure. Let us know how it was for you.
Oh goodness Don B, you did not drive me to this desperate measure - it was another Member!! Derek Jarman, well, you see I have so many happy memories of Dungerness as a child and fishing with my father, is not his garden beautiful? Oops, opening credits. The Hills are Alive etc. I may be gone sometime. Or not. I am quite excited! |
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Reality, sa molesworth 2, is so sordid it makes me shudder
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Stanley Stewart
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« Reply #62 on: 18:00:44, 26-05-2008 » |
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Anty
Did you "Climb every mountain
ford every stream;
follow every highway
till you find your dream" ?
Constance Shacklock used to bring down the house - and the house next door -
when she hit the top note at the Palace Threatre, Shaftesbury Avenue. Milton Shulman,
Evening Standard said that she could act as well as his left boot..but she could sing!
A quote from his review; 'Jam packed with sweet things' appeared on the theatre's facia
for almost six years.
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Antheil
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« Reply #63 on: 18:02:57, 26-05-2008 » |
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Anty, I hope I did not drive you to this desperate measure. Let us know how it was for you.
Omigod, Omigod. Why have I never seen The Sound of Music before? I loved it, there were even a couple of tears rolling down. It invoked memories of Casablanca as well. Thank you Mort for making me watch it. This may open a new world of musicals to me. Funny, my odd relationship with Nuns. Sister Veronica of the Convent at the end of the road (bless, I always think of richard barrett when I mention her now) gave me her rosary when I was about 8. My sister (who brought me up being 10 years older) made off with me childhood box of treasures which not only included the rosary but me great great granda's bosun's whistle (Royal Naval Dockyards) and a pig's tooth! |
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Reality, sa molesworth 2, is so sordid it makes me shudder
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George Garnett
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« Reply #64 on: 20:41:50, 26-05-2008 » |
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I am pretty sure I saw Bertice Reading singing Stormy Weather in the Derek Jarman film of The Tempest when it first came out. Elizabeth Welch, Don B. Here it is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=857Ste6wylM but, splendid as she is, it loses a lot being taken out of context. Placed as it is in the film after much grey, brown, silence and gloom the sailors' hornpipe/panpipe entrance dance which precedes her explodes in colour upon the screen. An Everest of High Camp. |
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« Last Edit: 21:44:00, 26-05-2008 by George Garnett »
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Don Basilio
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« Reply #65 on: 20:44:28, 26-05-2008 » |
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Constance Shacklock used to bring down the house - and the house next door -
I have almost as big a thing about contraltos as I do about nuns. Didn't Dame Julie and Mr Plummer refer to it as "The Sound of Mucous" to cope with their embarrassment at its success? Anty, most musicals are far less overtly sentimental. Try Guys and Dolls. Gold I cannot wish you gets the tears flowing for me, but without the sense of manipulation. |
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To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh: a time to mourn, and a time to dance
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Don Basilio
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« Reply #66 on: 20:52:13, 26-05-2008 » |
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to hear Cleo Laine' as Julie sing "Bill". Even at matinees she brought the house down. She'd exit and as I mimed my handclap, she'd say, "Hi, fellas. Isn't it camp?"
No, she was wrong. I got out the insert to the EMI casette boxed set of Showboat last night and looked up the words of Just my Bill. The tears were nearly running down my face as I hummed it through. It is not camp, and I reckon I know camp when I hear it (and judging from Valmouth, Dame Cleo did too.) I have read yards of P G Wodehouse, and I cannot think of anything he wrote as moving as the words here. It is a bit odd in a show in which the idiom is so very Deep South, (particularly the two black numbers, Ol' Man River, Can't Help Lovin') to have something so very English. It as though Blandings Castle comes to Natchez. |
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To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh: a time to mourn, and a time to dance
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Antheil
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« Reply #67 on: 21:16:13, 26-05-2008 » |
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Constance Shacklock used to bring down the house - and the house next door -
Anty, most musicals are far less overtly sentimental. Try Guys and Dolls. Gold I cannot wish you gets the tears flowing for me, but without the sense of manipulation. Don, I really enjoyed it, well it was a wet and dismal afternoon and what's wrong with a bit of emotion in the cicumstances? "Oh, you are so Austrian" "Well I am certainly not German" (I might have imagined that dialogue of course!) "Oh what are we going to do about Anty, 36 going on 16?" <snigger> Don't know about camp, but Billie Holiday "My Man" has to be up there for the greatest love song? And of course, tacking in a different direction towards the dark depths, Gloomy Sunday. |
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Reality, sa molesworth 2, is so sordid it makes me shudder
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Stanley Stewart
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« Reply #68 on: 21:30:48, 26-05-2008 » |
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Billie Holiday - My Man??? I think, Anty, you may mean the originator Fanny Brice?
(later featured in Funny Girl) - or is there an alternative recording, apart from Alice Faye in "Rose
of Washington Square" (1939)? Perhaps her man, Tyrone Power, was more you?
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Antheil
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« Reply #69 on: 21:55:34, 26-05-2008 » |
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Billie Holiday - My Man??? I think, Anty, you may mean the originator Fanny Brice?
(later featured in Funny Girl) - or is there an alternative recording, apart from Alice Faye in "Rose
of Washington Square" (1939)? Perhaps her man, Tyrone Power, was more you?
Stanley, I bow to your superior knowledge, but this is the Billie I mean http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh-nIicv39E |
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Reality, sa molesworth 2, is so sordid it makes me shudder
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Stanley Stewart
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« Reply #70 on: 22:20:01, 26-05-2008 » |
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My vote remains decisively over the Mississippi and the interaction between narrative and music.
Even the soubrette, Ellie, pinpoints the hazards of show-biz in 'Life Upon The Wicked Stage'.
'I've got talent but it aint been tested
No one's even interested.....
Ellie's partner, Frank Schultz, was played in the 1972 West End production by Kenneth Nelson,
an attractive American actor who got good notices when the Broadway Cast of "Boys in the Band"
played at Wyndham's Theatre in 1969; a performer with splendid vigour. Alas, the work offers
didn't follow and he took his own life some years later.
I also think of Rose in 'Gypsy', mother of Gypsy Rose Lee, the stripper. Classy music and lyrics by Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim. After a confrontation with her uppity daughter, she has a number of bruising intensity, Roses's Turn:
'...Some people got it
And make it pay.
Some people can't even
Give it away.
This people's got it
And this people's spreadin' it around.
You either have it
Or you've had it....'
Sondheim must be a future contender but, for now, I think it must be Kern & Hammerstein.
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Stanley Stewart
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« Reply #71 on: 22:31:53, 26-05-2008 » |
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Hey, Anty, I'll buy that performance. Fanny Brice breaks the heart and Billie H, against the odds of her experience, manages to suggest a survivor. Both offer dimension; the indicator of a good song. Thank you for that. 
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Antheil
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« Reply #72 on: 22:45:36, 26-05-2008 » |
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Reality, sa molesworth 2, is so sordid it makes me shudder
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Stanley Stewart
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« Reply #73 on: 15:10:15, 27-05-2008 » |
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Billie's, 'Stormy Weather'; couldn't get an audio connection last night, Anna, but as Scarlett said, 'Tomorrow is another day' - and it was worth the wait. Billie again in optimistic mode, against the sheer trauma of her life. I also favour interpretations by Ethel Waters and Judy Garland's blazing intensity in her 1961 Palladium Show. Twenty years later, Lena Horne was also totally seductive in her one-woman show at the Adelphi Theatre. GREAT broads - all of 'em! Lena spoke feelingly about the tendency, at MGM, to film her sequences, separately, so that they could be judiciously cut for the Southern States. Those 'Little girls from Little Rock' have much to answer for. MGM made a daft biopic of Rodgers & Hart, 'Words and Music' (1948) but the interpolated numbers are really out of this world. Lena Horne singing 'Honeysuckle Rose'; Garland & Rooney 'Johnny One Note' and Kelly & Charisse dancing 'Slaughter on 10th Avenue' among the dazzling highlights. |
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pim_derks
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« Reply #74 on: 21:18:15, 01-06-2008 » |
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'Pal Joey' Alas, the film version was sanitised although it did have Sinatra as Joey- an ideal bum, an anti-hero. The opening music from "Pal Joey" always reminds me of the controversial Dutch television programme "Glamourland". The creator of this show, the late Gert-Jan Dröge, used it as a signature tune: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAFZmQUbg2YIt was a very funny programme about the odd habits of the rich and famous in the Netherlands and abroad. I love those sheep!  |
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"People hate anything well made. It gives them a guilty conscience." John Betjeman
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