Wilde Cat“It requires some effort of analysis to understand why one person, among many who do a thing with accomplished skill, should be greater than the others; nor is it always easy to distinguish superiority from great popularity, when the two go together” begins TS Eliot’s appreciation of the great Music Hall artist Marie Lloyd. After seeing the Cabaret Diva Meow Meow in the extravaganza devised for her alone, I am left pondering the same question. The Viennese sängerin Ute Lemper (who unearthed Mischa Spolianksy’s Cabaret song Ich bin Ein Vamp now taken up by Meow as her theme song) ...
Archives for “Historical”
David and GoliathIn Washington in 1972, a break-in was intercepted at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel. The ‘thieves’ were not your average 'breakers & enterers' and had links to the secret services and before long a connection had been made between the thieves and the President’s staff and ultimately the President himself. The investigation leading up to Nixon’s resignation to avoid impeachment is still one of the greatest scandals in modern political history and his pardon by the succeeding president, Gerald Ford, only increased the public outrage. Peter Morgan has written a nice line ...
What do you suppose is the use of a child without any meaning? Even a joke should have some meaning - and a child's more important than a joke, I hopeThrough the Looking Glass. Chapter 9Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, along with his other non-academic writings (as an academic and under his real name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, he published mathematics and logic treatises) seemed to escaped operatic settings until quite recently. A 'Musical Dream Play' appeared as early as 1888 but apart from small scaled adaptations for school and amateur performance major English composers left ...
