Category: people

Groundbreaking opera singer Robert McFerrin has died of a heart attack in his home in St. Louis. McFerrin, father of Grammy-winning vocalist Bobby McFerrin, was the first black man to sing at the Metropolitan Opera, and provided the singing voice for Sidney Poitier in the 1959 film version of Gershwin’s “Porgy & Bess.”

Tom Stoppard’s massive new theatrical undertaking, “The Coast of Utopia,” is preparing for its New York premiere, and the playwright is as hands-on as ever in shepherding his creations from page to stage. “Stoppard — whose concerns resemble those of an Oxbridge don more than those of someone who chose not to attend university in order to pursue journalism — has always approached the intellectual backdrop of his plays with the zeal of an autodidact, sedulously researching historical facts and biographical accounts.”

Composer Steve Reich may be getting star treatment this year (he just turned 70,) but his music took a long time to be accepted in the concert hall. “The 1971 Boston Symphony performance of his ‘Four Organs’ — the first time his music had been played in a major concert venue — was cheered but also loudly booed in Symphony Hall. And when [Michael] Tilson Thomas performed the work in Carnegie Hall two years later, the audience proved even testier, erupting in protest in the middle of the performance.”

“At 84, Canada’s great expatriate writer Mavis Gallant complains that the body doesn’t move nearly as fast as the mind, but in person she is still like quicksilver — sly, fast and unpredictable… She carries into every encounter a reputation of ruthlessness, of one who doesn’t suffer fools at all — gladly or otherwise. But she chuckles at the idea that she could intimidate anyone and comes off as open and generous.”

Kurt Masur is one of an elite group of conductors whose names are known in all corners of the world. But Masur carries more than a musical reputation around with him: “if his life were a coin, its two sides would be musical and political. [He] will always be remembered as the man whose appeal for calm, when East Germany teetered on the brink of revolution in 1989, averted violence and possibly saved lives.”

Betty Comden and Adolph Green were one of show business’s great partnerships. “We meet, whether or not we have a project, just to keep up a continuity of working. There are long periods when nothing happens, and it’s just boring and disheartening. But we have a theory that nothing’s wasted, even those long days of staring at one another. You sort of have to believe that, don’t you? That you had to go through all that to get to the day when something did happen.”

The best Comden and Green lyrics were brash and buoyant, full of quick wit, best exemplified by “New York, New York,” an exuberant and forthright hymn to their favorite city. Yet even the songwriters’ biggest pop hits — “The Party’s Over,” “Just in Time” and “Make Someone Happy” — were simple, direct and heartfelt.

Sixty years on from her professional debut, she is making a rare appearance in the West End. Does she still think of herself as one of ours? “I’m not yours. I’m not anybody’s. I don’t feel that I belong particularly anywhere. I think probably one defines oneself much more by profession than nationality. I’m an actress.”

“Working at the margins of a system whose reliance on formula he loathed, he was Hollywood’s Whitman—hearing America not only singing, but loving, screwing, celebrating, cheating, praying, hustling and, above all, dreaming. In this world, he was the biggest dreamer of all.”

“Blindfolded, you could tell in the first few minutes that you were in a Robert Altman film, not because you couldn’t hear anything but because you could hear everything. It was called, glibly, ‘overlapping dialogue,’ based on Altman’s insight that only in the movies — and not in real life — do people wait politely while others speak, then respond in wittily shaped perfect sentences.”