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Tempus fugit: when you’re a Jet you stay a Jet — 9 Comments

  1. Every now and again, you’ll find on youtube or elsewhere, some of the folks you followed back in the day doing one of their signature numbers.
    And the song goes well, better if you didn’t know that there used to be a higher note just…there, and a longer vowel sound at the end of such and such a line.

  2. Neo, I read you every day and have for over a year. Although I have always been a conservative, as a Jewish north easterner, born and raised in Massachusetts, but now living in NJ and having attended Brandeis, I know well what it is like living among those who think of me as a political anomaly. I relish it and have, for more than 50 years.

    No matter! This is about your wonderful choice of Musicals. I love each and every posting you make and I marveled that you loved Carousel and now have posted West Side Story, another great. They are my numbers 2 and 3 great musicals, respectively. What are your thoughts on my number 1, The Music Man? Has there ever been a more perfect pairing than Robert Preston as Prof. Harold Hill? I would love to know your thoughts.

    Keep your Blog going. Your insights are well reasoned, they help me through difficult times and you are doing God’s work!

  3. I usually ignore your postings on theater and dance culture. Not because of course that there is anything wrong with them, but simply because it’s not an area in which I have any interest or can I appreciate. It just has no meaning for me.

    However, I have given this posting some thought as it provoked dim memories of a certain broader social milieu. An era when middle class people throughout the US – places like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland – commonly went to the theater to see road performances of Camelot, or The Sound of Music say, or Pygmalion. Mom in her stole, dad in his top coat, out with friends to the theater and then to dinner.

    The song itself as it was covered by others serves as an example of another topic you broached recently, the infantilization of the public and their taste for neotenous looking celebrities.

    Not long ago, thinking to give my mother a taste of what’s available on Youtube, and recalling seeing her old Vic Damone albums, I showed her a clip from some variety show featuring Damone singing what started off as a jokey version of “Tonight”. (topical reference)

    Frankly it was a bit depressing to mentally contrast this fellow who projected, an image at least, which I could recognize as a fellow male, and who might have even – as a general type – been one of the family men in the neighborhood when I was a little boy: but who now represented a type extinct from pop culture, and almost bred out of existence altogether.

    When did we become a race of perpetual juveniles which never mature, but merely decay?

  4. “”When did we become a race of perpetual juveniles which never mature, but merely decay?””
    DNW

    I think it’s an artifact of prosperity. People can’t mature without humbling adversity.

  5. bobbi: I think a lot of the musicals of the 40s and 50s were in a sort of golden age of musical theater. I saw many of the original productions that were in the 50s, and they were uniformly fabulous.

    That includes the original of “The Music Man.” However, it is not among my very very very favorites (which are probably the two you mentioned, “Carousel” and “West Side Story,” as well as “Fiddler On the Roof,” “The Fantastiks,” and “My Fair Lady”).

    I’d put “The Music Man” in the second tier, which is a wonderful tier as well—“Oklahoma,” “South Pacific,” and “The King and I” (all of which I saw during the 50s in City Center revivals rather than the original productions, although I had the original cast recordings and listened to them incessantly) fall into it. There are others I loved, too, less well known but very fine: “Fiorello” (which had some very funny songs about politics that hold up very well) and “Kiss Me Kate,” to name just two.

    I think that “The Music Man” was a little too foreign for me, which is funny because it’s really a slice of Americana. But I was a New Yorker, so something about Iowa was terra incognita. However, I adored Robert Preston. I actually had a big crush on him as a child. Something about his boundless energy really grabbed me.

  6. neo-neocon Says:
    December 29th, 2011 at 6:00 pm

    DNW: I don’t know when it happened, but I’d say it was within my lifetime.”

    It just occurred to me to wonder whether some part of this – again, some part – might not be due to a simple matter of who has the disposable income and the will to pursue and pay for certain kinds of entertainments. If the consumers are all, or mostly of one type, then the product will match.

    Call it the TigerBeat-ization of pop culture. (I think that is the name of the magazine my kid sisters, a half generation younger than myself, used to read)

    Because they are the ones paying to watch, movies are apparently largely manufactured and shaped and probably cast to suit the sensibilities of 14 year old boys; in much the same way that AOL has apparently been shaped to suit the peculiar sensibilities and tastes of Ariana Huffington.

    Roman Polanski, an unsavory character with problems of his own in this regard, has nonetheless made interesting comments on how film editing and scene framing techniques have been affected over the decades by attempts to appeal to a target audience of adolescents.

    And on a slightly different note, Blake Edwards in his commentary on his Panther series has had interesting things to say about the extended framing and long-cutting of his scenes.

    But I’m straying from my own point and wholly ignoring yours …

  7. DNW: I also read somewhere that the fact that movies are now widely distributed around the world makes them more likely to be action flicks or horror flicks or movies that don’t rely as much on dialogue or wit, which is harder to translate.

  8. I connect this wonderful post with your previous posts that contrasted Margot Fonteyn with younger, more lithe ballerinas…

    I think you are being too hard on older artists…. there’s a lot that the in-crowd may spot, but audiences do not – they are still responding to the total performance.

    In the current theater scene, Carol Lawrence’s soprano would be helped along by microphones – and Chita Rivera needs no help connecting with an audience.

    The problem really is the short-sighted assumption that only young people pay for entertainment – and only stories about/for young people are worth mounting and telling…. many of these artists still have a lot to say, maybe even more to say than when they were young.

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