60 Going On 16

Thriller

Right, today there will be no ranting on this blog. Time for some more dancing instead. I was 11 when West Side Story opened at Her Majesty's Theatre in London in December 1958. My brother and his wife went to see it and were bowled over and you couldn't turn on the radio without hearing one or other of those amazing songs.

I didn't get to see the stage version but my brother bought me the LP for Christmas. Within a week I had learned every word of every song by heart and, yes, I still have that LP. But I had to wait until 1961 and the film version, with its dubbed voices for Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer et al, before I saw all that exhilarating dancing. 

West Side Story was moody, edgy - and about teenagers (no wonder I loved it) - and represented the most extraordinary amalgam of talent: music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and choreography by Jerome Robbins. Nowhere does that combination work more explosively than in America. But with Rita Moreno, who needed no dubbing, in the role of Anita, how could it fail? Moreno won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her performance. Here's why:

Tango in the night

I frequently dream about dancing; sometimes I dream about dancing the tango . . .

One of the many scenes that remain with me from Linda Grant's thought-provoking novel, The Clothes on Their Backs, takes place in the 1970s "in a large room in Paddington above a shop selling ironmongery in a street off Sussex Gardens". (I remember that street, that shop . . .) This is where people go to dance the tango, a dance that has the power to transform, as Vivien, the narrator - the daughter of Jewish refugees from Hungary - experiences:

"I felt alive again, that I was not a person who only existed within the pages of a book, a papery individual. Not happy, for the music was very dark, but it gave the darkness of my own life, the sadness, the physical ache - its real meaning. We are born to suffer, we can't avoid pain. All we can do is enter it, and turn it against itself. And that's what tango does."

And I can't think of a better literary description of the tango, a dance that I could watch ad infinitum, a dance that seems to become more redolent with meaning the older the dancers. On film, Al Pacino captured this perfectly in The Scent of a Woman, in which - in an Oscar-winning role - he plays Frank Slade, a blind, retired US army officer who pays a young student to take care of him over a Thanksgiving weekend in New York. (Full synopsis here.) At the Waldorf-Astoria, the colonel is captivated by the perfume worn by a beautiful young woman whom he persuades to take to the floor with him - to dance a tango:

Unforgettable, not least the music, that most haunting of tangos, Por Una Cabeza. Film-makers love it; for example, Por Una Cabeza, played by Quartetto Gelato, makes an apppearance in James Cameron's True Lies but most memorably in the opening sequences of Schindler's List, where Spielberg opted for Carlos Gardel's original vocal version and where cinematography, lighting, acting and music all merge to form what remains one of cinema's most powerful openings: 

Woody Guthrie: unAudied

I'm not sure what I think about Woody Guthrie's Car Song being used to sell ever so expensive Audi vehicles. On reflection, I'd rather just have the music and photos of the man himself. No Audi ads. No cars. Woody - pure and simple.

Burns Night - the Edinburgh Boy's choice

As he rightly points out, the Edinburgh Boy is the only member of this household whose veins pulse with one hundred per cent Caledonian blood. Even his bark, he assures me, has a distinct East Lothian burr. On the basis of which, he is feeling a little miffed that he wasn't asked to choose the words and music for tonight's celebrations. Had anyone had the courtesy to ask, he says he would have chosen Andy M Stewart's version of My Luve is Like a Red, Red Rose. And please note the M, says the Edinburgh Boy, which distinguishes this Andy Stewart from the one who used to bang on about a man called Donald and his missing troosers. Well, how could I not oblige?

 

The Edinburgh Boy has also been listening to an excellent tribute to Burns over at the BBC - poems by podcast, downloads and all manner of technological wizardry. I can see I'll get no sense out of him until some time tomorrow. But what price a happy black Labrador - and true Scot? 

A little Burns Night music - for the 250th anniversary

Ae Fond Kiss was the first Burns poem I learned by heart. It was one of nine written by Burns to "Clarinda" (Nancy McLehose), whom he met in December 1987 and with whom he conducted a passionate love affair until she sailed to the Caribbean in January 1792. This poem marked their final parting. 

Here's the wonderful Eddi Reader's sung version: