distressing news
Jules Levin
ameliede at EARTHLINK.NET
Sun Sep 17 04:14:42 UTC 2006
At 06:47 AM 9/16/2006, you wrote:
>I, who live and work quite near (within 300 miles or something like
>that) Welk's hometown of Strasburg, ND, can answer your question. He
>is (well, he was in life) a German-from-Russia whose family settled
>out here on the prairie in a community of like-minded individuals.
>He worked his way up to a stunningly prosaic weekly talent-show
>(singing and dancing, but nothing too foreign or too rock-n-rollish)
>of a program on the television. It aired for YEARS (25?) and is now
>in continual re-runs, many of which are shown on the Public
>Broadcasting System in North Dakota. Welk's music is
>accordion-polka type stuff for the most part (some happily distorted
>show tunes and misguided operatic snippets), always peppy and
>saccharine enough to cause the breakdown of every molecule of
>pancreatic juice that is anywhere near the airwaves. It's folkish
>by way of a creepy kind of fake hometown good cheer that is
>Hollywoodized with a lot of sequins and the occasional tuxedo. Welk
>laid off the
>accordion and bouncily wielded the baton in his later
>years. Everybody and his Gran loves Welk (the exceptions being
>Disenchanted Youth and Pinko professorial types like ourselves). To
>go to New York City to take in a Lloyd Weber musical is considered
>an act of sacrilege to those who can instead take a geriatric tour
>bus to Branson, Missouri to see "live" (I use the term loosely) acts
>of the once-youthful Welk proteges is ever so much more
>Normal. Everyone knows that only the copyright fees keep midwestern
>community theatre companies from "doing" Lloyd Weber musicals--that
>and the fact that they are "too long." Why watch a rockstar Jesus
>dance around practically naked on Broadway when you can just turn on
>the television and see a grinning Welkian foursome of corn-fed
>forty-year-olds tap-dance through a far-shorter and much more
>tasteful version of "Jesus Christ Superstar"? Get real, John!
>
>I don't think we can compare Welk to Lloyd Weber, although a
>comparison of their popularity statistics might be an interesting
>read if one were dead drunk. Welk would never have even wanted to
>have known about some Russian novel that was Probably Commie Anyway
>and therefore most certainly Not a Fit Subject for Musical
>Numbers. Lloyd Weber at least has those minions who can read around
>and find out about this Bukgakov person's work.
I seem to detect the aroma of Nabokov's essay on Gogol and poshlost'...
Jules Levin
>Kris Groberg
>
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