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A lifetime ago a man I once loved gave me the gift of Kenny Rankin the way one passes on an insider tip about the markets or the missing ingredient in a beloved biscuit recipe. The gift endured (outlasting the relationship, and the lover’s death), to the extent that often I’ve foisted the New York City-born Rankin…
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Ah come, come quickly, spring! come and lift us towards our culmination, we myriads; we who have never flowered, like patient cactuses. Come and lift us to our end, to blossom, bring us to our summer we who are winter-weary in the winter of the world. D.H. Lawrence, Craving for Spring My ambivalence about spring…
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Haul out the superlatives for Every Little Step. James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo have made a documentary that on its surface is about the casting of the 2006 revival of Michael Bennett’s 1975 Broadway smash, A Chorus Line. A wise man once said the theater is a metaphor for life, but one doesn’t…
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Though we both hailed from Ohio, I never knew Bud Shank, but when I was in grade school he got me in trouble. It all had to do with a flute solo of his, a contribution of dreamy coolness that helped make California Dreamin’ (it’s the song’s break) a hit for the Mamas and the…
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He made you hear the twisted murmurings of colonial India, the elegiac Russian winter and the swirling Arabian desert sands. His film scores comprised the breadth of modern cinema: Lawrence of Arabia, The Longest Day, The Tin Drum, A Passage to India, Fatal Attraction, Dr. Zhivago, Witness and Ghost. There were three Academy Awards and…
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Back in the early 90s my ex and I joined forces and built a cabaret act, the type of thing a New York performer does when he gets tired of waiting for someone else to give him a job. As we poured through material I recalled a tune I’d heard on one of Lena Horne’s albums. The…
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With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame—George Eliot…
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Through HAIR, I learned that there was such a thing as Broadway. By 1969, covers of the songs had invaded the airways via The Cowsills, The Fifth Dimension and Three Dog Night, but somehow the show’s original cast album also made its way into our home. It was a departure from my steady diet…
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Delaney Bramlett, Freddie Hubbard, Bernie Hamilton, Daniel Nagrin, Ann Savage, and Edward Purdom—this list of high-and-low cultured show folk said their last goodbyes at year’s end. Now Pat Hingle’s gone, a character actor whose work spanned TV, film and the Broadway stage. So many memorable performances (he was unforgettable as the hood who burned a…
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