Saturday Night Fever Research Articles

Something happened: a political and cultural overview of the seventies

In both the literal and metaphorical senses, it seemed as if 1970s America was running out of gas. The decade not only witnessed long lines at gas stations but a citizenry that had grown weary and disillusioned. High unemployment, runaway inflation, and the energy crisis, caused in part by U.S. dependence on Arab oil, characterized an increasingly bleak economic situation. As Edward D. Berkowitz demonstrates, the end of the postwar economic boom, Watergate, and defeat in Vietnam led to an unraveling of the national consensus. During the decade, ideas about the United States, how it should be governed, and how its economy should be managed changed dramatically. Berkowitz argues that the postwar faith in sweeping social programs and a global U.S. mission was replaced by a more skeptical attitude about government's ability to positively affect society. From Woody Allen to Watergate, from the decline of the steel industry to the rise of Bill Gates, and from Saturday Night Fever to the Sunday morning fervor of evangelical preachers, Berkowitz captures the history, tone, and spirit of the seventies. He explores the decade's major political events and movements, including the rise and fall of d tente, congressional reform, changes in healthcare policies, and the hostage crisis in Iran. The seventies also gave birth to several social movements and the rights revolution, in which women, gays and lesbians, and people with disabilities all successfully fought for greater legal and social recognition. At the same time, reaction to these social movements as well as the issue of abortion introduced a new facet into American political life-the rise of powerful, politically conservative religious organizations and activists. Berkowitz also considers important shifts in American popular culture, recounting the creative renaissance in American film as well as the birth of the Hollywood blockbuster. He discusses how television programs such as All in the Family and Charlie's Angels offered Americans both a reflection of and an escape from the problems gripping the country.

"I Want to See All My Friends At Once": Arthur Russell and the Queering of Gay Disco

Disco, it is commonly understood, drummed its drums and twirled its twirls across an explicit gay-straight divide. In the beginning, the story goes, disco was gay: Gay dancers went to gay clubs, celebrated their newly liberated status by dancing with other men, and discovered a vicarious voice in the form of disco's soul and gospel-oriented divas. Received wisdom has it that straights, having played no part in this embryonic moment, co-opted the culture after they cottoned onto its chic status and potential profitability. With Sylvester and John Travolta marking out the polar opposites of disco's terrain, it was supposed to be easy to spot the difference. The sequined black gay falsetto, who delivered soul and gospel-charged disco, embodied the movement's gay roots, while the white straight hustling star of Saturday Night Fever, who was happiest dancing to the shrill pop of the Bee Gees, represented its commercialisation and suburbanisation. In this article, however, I want to refract this popular analysis through a queer lens in order to explore not just the mixed composition of early dance crowds, which I take to be a historical given (Lawrence 2004a), but, more importantly, the way in which both the dance floor experience and disco's musical aesthetics could be said to be queer (rather than gay). I will also examine how disco producers, responding to the mainstreaming of disco culture from the mid-1970s onwards, took the genre in fresh and unsettling directions. These questions will be explored through the decidedly odd figure of Arthur Russell, whose disco releases stand as an allegory of the unexplored relationship between gay and queer disco.

Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate (review)

Music: The We Love to Hate. Edited by Christopher Washburne and Maiken Derno. New York: Routledge, 2004. [x, 379 p. ISBN 0-415-94366-3. $24.95.] Illustrations, index. Every now and then a book comes along articulates something is embedded in our collective cultural conscience we rarely see publicly discussed. Music: The We Love to Hate is such a volume. It is one thing to hear a song and impose our judgments on it, conditioned or otherwise; but to publish a scholarly work about such a subversive topic as this, in many ways underscores our personal opinions about what is music, well, is quite another undertaking. But Christopher J. Washburne and Maiken Derno have done just in their new collection of essays. The idea for the book germinated from a discussion held by Washburne and Tim Taylor over a glass of wine about how scholars typically avoid discussions of everyday, mundane music, and focus more on is highly influential or significant in some way within the prescribed canon. They organized a Bad Music panel for the 2001 meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Out of panel came this wonderfully diverse and interdisciplinary book. The increasing acceptance of the study of popular culture as an area of serious academic scholarship is bridging the gap between highbrow and lowbrow culture, including art and (p. 2). Heretofore, gatekeepers of academic inquiry have not valued the of the masses-which, according to Washburne and Derno in their introduction, serve[s] as the soundtrack to our daily lives-because we disdain it or take it for granted (p. 3). Some of the seventeen contributors have sought to defend the right of musical parody, camp, irony, cheese, experimentation, and celebratory masquerade (p. 7) as viable members of the family of music, even though these styles may be privately known as the black sheep. Consequently, helps readers find their way from auditory cheesecake (the sublime) to the musically banal (ridiculous) without denouncing either, unless they so choose. We are all guilty of thinking or saying what we deem to believe is good or music. Do any of the following register a bleep on your Cringe Factor graph? Lounge (conjure up Bill Murray's polyester-clad character on Saturday Night Live); smooth jazz (Kenny G style); folk revival music; golden throats; karaoke; elevator / dentist office music, or muzak; film (Yentlperhaps?); disco (Saturday Night Fever?); polka music; opera; rap; bubblegum pop; American Idol; someone/anyone singing in the shower; minstrelsy; extreme hard core punk; New Age; the accordion; glitch; Christmas carols; a soloist crooning to taped accompaniment; metal; hillbilly (the label itself denotes disdain); lip-synching and air guitar; techno; minimalism; rock operas; contemporary country; easy listening; yodeling; klezmer; the shotgun vibrato of a Tiny Tim or a Buffy Sainte-Marie; other easy targets have been ABBA, Britney Spears, Shanaia Twain, Liberace, and Wayne Newton. Some of these and further examples are noted in The book is divided into four sections, preceded by an introduction by Washburne and Derno, and a discussion by Simon Frith on What is Music. The last section contains the first complete English translation of Carl Dahlhaus's Trivialmusik, whose aesthetic judgments published in 1967 share an uncanny resemblance to comments made in this collection of essays (Introduction, p. 12). In her essay Theorizing the Musically Abject, Elizabeth Tolbert provides a succinct definition of music, as that which disturbs identity, systems, and order (Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Louis S. Roudiez [New York: Columbia University Press, 1982], 115). However, does not try to define what is bad music (although plenty of examples are given) as much as it tries to examine the cultural and historical degrees of valuations within a variety of different genres and contexts (p. …

America Is a Diet Pepsi: Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues

Thomas King. SHERM AN ALEXIE. Photograph. This portrait of Sherman Alexie is part of King’s “Shooting the Lone Ranger” series, which will ultimately become a section of his projected book of blackand 'white photographs of Native artists in North America, the Medicine River Photographic Expedition. Describing this series, King says, “I did the same thing Edward Curtis did. I took around a box of Indian parapherna­ lia and part of it was the Lone Ranger mask, but I had arrows-throughthe -head and phony baloney Indian wigs that some of the people put on. It became very clear that the most successful piece of paraphernalia was the Lone Ranger mask. And the artists that I showed my box of goodies to inevitably went to that. Just put on that mask. That they could be the Lone Ranger” (from Jennifer Andrews, “Border Trickery and Dog Bones: A Conversation with Thomas King,” Studies in Canadian Literature 24.2 [1999]: 176). A m e r i c a is a D i e t P e p s i: S h e r m a n A l e x i e ’s R e s e r v a t io n B l u e s B l y t h e T e l l e f s e n “You ain’t really Indian unless there was some point in your life that you didn’t want to be.” — Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues Simulations are the absence of the tribal real; the postindian con­ versions are in the new stories of survivance over dominance. —Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners Soon after 9/11, I walked out of my health club in downtown Seattle, and a white man in a BIG truck with a BIG American flag, stopped at the crosswalk, leaned out his window, and yelled, “Why don’t you go back to your own country?” Doubled over with laughter, it took me several seconds before I could stand up and yell back, “You first!” Later, my white friend who grew up on the rez, said to me, “ Sherman, maybe he said, ‘Go back to your own county??” ’ — Sherman Alexie, Lecture at Riverside Community College, May 9, 2002 When Sherman Alexie “crawled beneath / the HUD house // with a blowtorch // [he] discovered / America” (First Indian 40). When the char­ acters in his 1995 novel, Reservation Blues, return to their Seattle hotel lobby, they too “discovered America. No. They actually discovered Victor and Junior sleeping on couches in the lobby. No. They actually discovered Victor passed out on a couch while Junior read USA Today” (Reservation 242). Thus is “America” redefined in 1995 by a Spokane Indian. Alexie’s description of himself as a “Brady Bunch Indian” pinpoints the fractured, dissonant nature of the culture through which his char­ acters fight for self-definition (Gillan 92). Although Alexie’s novels ask what it means to be a twentieth-century American Indian, they invariably highlight the complexity of the question rather than offering an answer to it. His characters struggle to create themselves on reserva­ tions in an America permeated by consumer products, television, popular music, and movies— all of which define them at least as much as they 1 2 6 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 5 define themselves. Consequently, one of the most tragically funny scenes in Reservation Blues stems from Victor Joseph’s self-identification with an image from Saturday Night Fever: He had won a few thousand dollars in Reno way back in 1979, just after he graduated from high school. He bought a closet full of silk shirts and polyester pants and had never had any money since then to buy anything new. He hadn’t gained any weight in thirteen years, but the clothes were tattered and barely held to his body. His wardrobe made him an angry man. (12) Victor’s anger blossoms from a complex combination of cultural values that permeates Reservation Blues. Victor is a “reservation John Travolta” not only because he once tried to become...

Grease Cowboy Fever; or, the Making of Johnny T

Through a mix of theory, memoir and performance narrative, this chapter examines the making of drag persona Johnny T. as part of a king movement where the dominant cultural paradigm of gender is reconsidered and remastered. As seen in Grease, Saturday Night Fever and Urban Cowboy, pop culture icon John Travolta's particular blend of 50s greaser, faggy 70s disco, and 80s country masculinities are shown to be prime drag king conditions, particularly for a dyke who came of age during the 70s Travolta fever. While drawing from personal experience as a king, current trends in the king movement, and gender theory, this essay calls into question the lines between performing masculinity on and off the stage, inviting us to see both the work and play, the parody and realness, the struggle and liberation that make up the transgressive world of drag kinging and gender variance. Drawing upon gender theorists Judith Butler and Judith Halberstam, gender is exposed as a social construction both produced and performed, and as such, drag kinging is framed as an arena where gender is reconfigured.

Being Logical About Desert Island Reading

To begin with, I refuse to be stranded on a desert island: sand without vegetation, hot sun, and salty water are just not conducive to good thinking. So let’s get into deserted tropical island mood, which is what everyone else has been doing. First, let’s wind time back to around 1978. This is important because our bodies can do without some luxuries, and, let’s face it, life is generally more fun when one is young. We have a copy of Let’s go guide to Asia, the student bible to living on $5 a day. Reeling from the sights, smells, sounds, crowding and especially traffic of weeks of mid-day sun in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei and Bangkok, it is time to take a breather. A half-a-day train journey from Bangkok leaves us in Suratthani, 1 then a bus, followed by a ferry with farm animals, ending with a jump over the water (there is no gang plank), and we have (literally) landed on the island of Ko Samui, off the coast of Thailand. Locals with rickshaw-style tricycles and mopeds (no cars in sight on the island) invite you to stay on beaches with luxurious accommodations (palm huts over sand). After the obligatory swim, we finish off a lovely fried banana, regretfully refuse the itinerant peddler’s fresh Thai pineapple sliced on the spot (a sure way to get “Bali belly” because the hand touching the outside of the pineapple also touches the edible part), and manage to convince the locals to turn off the boombox playing “Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive”. (It is the height of Saturday Night Fever, and native culture in Southeast Asia is already reeling from the onslaught of Western nonsense, including blue jeans worn at 100 ◦ F in the shade.) We are sitting in a hut raised on stilts, watching the sun set. (See the above web site for visual aids in picturing the scene.) I dig through my pack to find something to read, and after tossing aside the latest James Clavell epic as being insufficiently uplifting, I find a photocopy of 22 pages of formal stuff titled “The Proper Treatment of Quantifiers in Ordinary English”. Since it is a chapter from a book (Hintikka et al., 1974), it doesn’t even have the name of the author on it, but vaguely it is coming back to me—yes, it is by Richard Montague. I start reading, but in a few minutes I doze off in the balmy breeze. (Scene repeats itself over 6 months on the beaches of Hawaii, Bali, New Zealand, New Caledonia, and Sri Lanka.) So why was I carrying this soporific with me? Well, having just finished a PhD thesis which had two linguists on the committee, I was doing what most like-minded computer scientists were doing at that time: trying to figure out intensional logic and Montague grammar. Montague’s semantics for natural language were deliciously perverse: the meaning of a proper noun like John was not a constant, as one might expect, but more like the set of properties that can be said to hold of that individual:lambda P. P(john). To make tricky things work out, the final meaning is actually (lambda P).([ ex P]) ( in john) and the meaning of “John sleeps” is obtained by applying the preceding function to the argument

Novel Paesans: The Reconstruction of Italian-American Male Identify in Anthony Valerio's Converstion with Johnny and Robert Viscusi's Astoria

Do we need to rehabilitate paesan? What I mean is, do we need to reconstruct public identity of Italian-American man? If we survey great cocktail party of American literary scene, we recognize in crowd faces of many Italian-American men: among writers of fiction, Don DeLillo; among poets, Lawrence Ferlinghetti; among scholars, Frank Lentricchia; among editors, Jonathan Galassi; even among captains of our literary industry, Leonard Riggio, President of Barnes and Noble. Watching these distinguished gentlemen operate, we feel certain that old stereotypes of Italian-American men as mafiosi, brutes, sexual predators, or idiots are behind us. But then, at same party, we overhear Italian-American intellectuals lament or even glorify these same stereotypes, discuss their presence in movies and television shows that we all know (and maybe secretly admire), and we begin to wonder. A few years ago, John Gotti, from jail, was making cover of Time magazine. Much to chagrin of Italian-American critics, Spike Lee's Jungle Fever was exploiting public preconception of a mythic Italian-American male penchant for violence, and sexist relations with women (Viscusi, qtd. in Verdicchio 187); around same time, cast of Saturday Night Live played a running sketch in which a pair of lecherous waiters with hokey Italian accents assaulted female patrons of their restaurant (usually guest hosts of show) with unwanted amorous attention, calling them Bellissima!, until they finally forced them into sexually compromising positions. And then, of course, we have work of Mario Puzo. The Godfather continues to be read and seen by millions, having enjoyed a 1997 re-release in theaters and on video as part of The Godfather trilogy, as well as a ubiquity on cable and satellite television networks. Not to mention his best-selling 1996 novel and 1997 hit Mafia miniseries The Last Don, which, according to network promos for its sequel, The Last Don II, captivated over fifty-two million viewers. Wide-release films, syndicated television shows, video rentals, and cable television help to perpetuate negative Italian-American stereotypes. Among creatures of film, syndication, and video who will not die are The Fonz of Happy Days, a macho Latin-lover type; Tony Manero of Saturday Night Fever, a less intelligent Latin-lover type; Rocky Balboa, a brute; and Puzo's cast of colorful mafiosi. In 1984, Rudolph Vecoli cited a study of images of Italian-Americans presented on television, which concluded that public was treated to twice as many negative portrayals as positive ones, and that one out of six [Italian-American characters] was engaged in criminal activities, most held low status jobs, and majority did not speak English correctly (53). Although shows such as HBO's The Sopranos, conceived with a great deal of cultural savoir-faire by pseudonymous Italian-American David Chase, have arguably complicated existing stereotypes, many shows and films (The Godson, Mafia!, any show starring Tony Danza) have simply perpetuated them. Whatever we may think of above-mentioned characters as models for emulation, great numbers of Italian-American men have found sources of identity in stereotypes that films like Saturday Night Fever and The Godfather promulgate. Vecoli rightly claims that although some Italian-Americans responded to The Godfather and its sequels by protesting and picketing films, many took them as the Italian-American equivalent of Alex Haley's Roots (55). Vecoli also, importantly, recognizes that such self-caricature and self-denigration result from lack of awareness of cultural material for construction of positive Italian-American identities (55). To this point at least, Italian-American artists and intellectuals have done little to mine for their fellow Italian-Americans cultural marble trapped inside a mountain of negative images. …

Saturday night fever? Reasons for referral from health centres to hospitals during weekends in Finland.

We aimed to examine the reasons for referral from health centres to hospitals during the weekend in Finland. We conducted a survey of all referrals from general practice on two weekends (30 November to 6 December 1992 and 28 November to 4 December 1994) in central and northern Finland, which covered 72% of the area of the country and one-third of the population. The participants were 178 GPs from public health centres and who made 530 referrals during these weekends. The outcome measures were reasons for referrals by ICPC codes with respect to the characteristics of patients, GPs and practices. During the weekends studied, 530 patients were referred from out-of-hours work. More male (53%) than female patients (47%) were referred. Out of a total of 530 patients, 213 (40%) were referred to surgery, 139 (26%) to internal medicine, 48 (9%) paediatric medicine, 32 (6%) to neurology, 28 (5%) to both ear, nose and throat (ENT) and psychiatry, 25 (5%) to gynaecology and 18 (4%) to other specialities (ophthalmology, lung disease and cancer departments). Fractures requiring surgery, angina pectoris for which patients were sent to internal medicine and stroke for which patients were sent to other specialities were the most commonly reported reasons for referral. Male patients were referred 12 times more often than females for arrhythmia (atrial fibrillation or tachyarrhythmia); males experienced dislocations eight times more often and fractures three times more often than females. Our results point out the need to train GPs about those complaints that most often require a referral to specialist care during the weekend. Future research should focus on those patients who are responsible for the huge gender gap of reasons for referral during weekends.

"Saturday night fever": ecstasy related problems in a London accident and emergency department.

OBJECTIVES: To report on the extent and nature of acute MDMA (ecstasy) related problems presenting to a large London hospital's accident and emergency (A&E) department. METHOD: The computerised attendance records...

Saturday night fever: Circumstances of the first sexual intercourse among Swiss teenagers: Pierre-André Michaud, MD, Françoise Narring, MD, MPH, Institut Universitaire de médecine sociale et préventive, Lausanne, Switzerland

Saturday night fever: Circumstances of the first sexual intercourse among Swiss teenagers: Pierre-André Michaud, MD, Françoise Narring, MD, MPH, Institut Universitaire de médecine sociale et préventive, Lausanne, Switzerland

Gender and Class Mobility in Saturday Night Fever and Flashdance

Gender and Class Mobility in Saturday Night Fever and Flashdance

Guns in the Household

Last October several bizarre coincidences led to the death of a 16-year-old Japanese exchange student in a suburb of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The student and his American friend, looking for a Halloween party, missed the correct house by a few doors and rang the wrong doorbell. The exchange student, in the spirit of the holiday, was moving around in mimicry of John Travolta in the movie Saturday Night Fever, and the frightened woman who answered the door called to her husband to get his gun. The husband mistook a camera in the student's hand for a weapon, and when the . . .

Conventions in the Documentary Recording of Dance: Research Needs

Many creative people have produced films using dance as the main or secondary subject matter. The past decade has brought such major studio productions as The Turning Point (Ross, 1977), Nijinsky (Ross, 1980), Saturday Night Fever (Badham, 1977), Flash Dance (Lyne, 1983), Staying Alive (Stallone, 1983), Breakin' I & II (Silberg 1984), and Dirty Dancing (Ardolino, 1987), and independent films like In a Rehearsal Room (Hahn, 1975), Dune Dance (Brown, 1981), and Space City (Brentano and Horn, 1980), as well as much of the rock-video genre. The directors and/or choreographers of these films have produced dances for the camera that often could not, or at least did not, exist except on the television or movie screen. Angles chosen to frame shots and the rhythm of editing used to determine pace were selected for the cinematic value they produced. They expressed either the creative impulses of the filmmaker, those of the choreographer interpreted by the filmmaker through an active collaboration, or (only rarely) those of the choreographer as filmmaker. In these cases the techniques unique to film and video have been used to create dance events for the screen.But what of dance works that have been choreographed to be seen on the proscenium stage? It is, perhaps, even more challenging, if not as apparently creative, to try to preserve on film or tape the composition and pattern and inherent rhythm of such choreography; that is, to bring a faithful translation of the choreographer's vision to the audience in front of the screen. Dance film that strives to provide the same aesthetic result as that of the staged choreography is a demanding art form in its own right; it draws upon all our understanding of the principles of documentary film and of visual perception. What makes this such a difficult task? Why is it so hard to maintain the energy, the excitement, and the aesthetic values of the performance when presenting the content of the prescribed space and the specific time of the real world, on the screen? The reason may be that we do not yet fully understand the interactions that occur between that objectively limited space of the world and the subjectively defined space produced by the camera.

Disco: Afro-American Vernacular Performance

“Disco” summons a variety of images to the minds of urban dwellers in the United States today. Many people think of teenagers carrying portable stereo tape players, sometimes called “ghetto blasters,” and recall how their loud and pulsating presence unceremoniously overwhelms all human life along their path. Some think of chic, glittering couples dancing the night away in dark discotheques. Whatever the image, disco is perceived as a style—of dancing, music, clothes. Disco is a social scene, a fad, a craze.Disco is also, undeniably, a multi-media phenomenon, depending not only on the direct contact of social relationships but information and services transmitted by different forms of mass media. The movie Saturday Night Fever (1977) was possibly the single most important mass media event in heightening public awareness of disco dancing in the last several years. But every day, networks of media and entertainment industry ideas are negotiated and guided out to the public at large. These negotiations involve interplay between national and local television, the recording industry and local radio, local radio and the public, and then several levels of inter- and intra-community relationships. Popular images of disco are a conglomerate of data from these myriad sources.

Bait/Rebait: Teachers Should Be Required to Write for Publication

In Saturday Night Fever, the Bee Gees's hit song Stayin' Alive elicits strong sentiment for surviving difficulties, for staying afloat in life's rough waters, for not scuttling across the floors of silent seas as does Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock. Writing for publication can evoke in English teachers a similar sense of staying alive, of not drowning in the sea of day-to-day detail, academic paperwork, and administrative chores. Unfortunately, publish or perish has been used only to describe college professors who, if they don't publish, suffer from withheld pay increases, nonpromotions, and possibly denial of tenure. In my view, however, publish or perish refers primarily to individuals, not to level or rank. Thus, any English teacher who does not write for publication is not alive in the field. As the person who stops moving in deep water will drown, so the English teacher who does not maintain publication activity will intellectually and emotionally perish. Submitting two articles a year may seem awesome; however, considering both time and opportunities available, it is not. It means only one piece per semester, not including summer, when most teachers have time. If English teachers use the time to digest experiences, to read, and to create classroom techniques, they will also accumulate the knowledge and insight needed to generate publishable materials. Like Henry James's house of fiction, the house of classroom theory and practic has many window , enough f r every view. English teachers may locate these windows by exploring such res urces as the Directory of Small Magazine Pres Editors and Publishers, Writer's Market, the Directory of Publishing Opportunities, as well as bibliographies found in journals like the one for composition te chers in English Journal, January 1980.

Logotherapy as a bridge between religion and psychotherapy

13. Professor Jack Van Hooser of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary's Department of Old Testament Literature and Languages is currently preparing a critique of Freud's Moses and Monotheism for an article we are writing together. 14. Zimet, C. N., "The Masters Degree in Applied Psychology: An Issue That Will Not Go Away," The Psychotherapy Bulletin, 1976, 9 (4), 3. 15. There are presently over 250 Clinical Pastoral Education centers that provide pastoral train ing for ministers, seminary students, and other religious workers. They are located in psychiatric and general hospitals, penal and correctional institutions, juvenile treatment centers, parishes and intercity missions, community mental health centers, counseling and rehabilitation centers, children's homes, and centers for the aging. Further information may be secured from the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education, Inc., c/o Interchurch Center, Suite 450, 475 Riverside Drive, New York, New York 10027. 16. By "intermodal" I mean individual, shortand long-term psychotherapy, conjoint marital and/or divorce counseling, as well as group psychotherapy, and crisis intervention. 17. Kohut, H., The Restoration of the Self. New York, International Universities Press, 1977, p. 271. 18. In an unpublished paper Kohut makes a similar comment about another award-winning film. His focus is false sexuality, a characteristic so evident in Saturday Night Fever:

New Jersey Shakespeare Festival

shock to an audience prepared rather for the poignant accents of Juliet's tender farewell. It was a daring directorial stroke; but its chief effect was in some degree to distract the audience from attending to the touching decorum of Juliet's last words to her lover's corpse. While one sometimes felt that the young persons of the drama would have been equally at home in Saturday Night Fever, Leslie Geraci made an appealing Juliet. In early moments of the play, it was hard to believe that this figure could muse thoughtfully on the prodigious birth of love, or consider any love-contract rash, too unadvis'd, too sudden; over the course of the evening, however, the actress managed to suggest something at least of Juliet's change from innocent girl to mature woman. Charles Shaw-Robinson gave us an athletic Romeo, but one in no way distinguished by sensitivity of spirit from the group of well-fixed corner-boys who are his associates. As for Randle Mell's Tybalt, beyond a certain hauteur, there was nothing of the particular capacity for hate that from the first informs and directs this character. Alone of all these younger figures, Tom Robbins, playing Mercutio, took full advantage of his part's potential, in this case for fantastical extravagance. He came equipped with a rapier, but made play chiefly with an emphatically phallic six-foot wooden staff, pointing up every sexual suggestion. Now and then one felt that this figure had wandered in from some other play: hints of a manic-depressive personality hung about him. The audience loved Mercutio, however, and with some cause, for Robbins brought sparkle and vivacity to the part. No presentation of Romeo and Juliet can go altogether wrong if the persons who play Friar Laurence and the Nurse understand their craft. Richard Ooms and Claudia Wilkens, experienced players both, delivered Shakespeare's lines with sympathy and point, suiting action to the word, confidently observing the modesty of nature. The audience felt comfortable with these figures, and perceptibly relaxed when either was onstage. Given the present-day emphasis of Jackson's, staging, one might have expected modern dress: in the event, however, the costumes, designed by Jeanne Button, were satisfyingly rich and Elizabethan. John Jensen's impressive single set was employed with intelligence and imagination in the director's swiftly-paced rendering of the tragedy.

Saturday Night Fever and Nashville: Exploring the Comic Mythos

The Journal of Popular CultureVolume XII, Issue 3 p. 557-571 Saturday Night Fever and Nashville: Exploring the Comic Mythos Richard Hasbany, Richard Hasbany Richard Hasbany is in the Office of Experimental Education at UCLA. He has published several major studies of the American musical in various journals.Search for more papers by this author Richard Hasbany, Richard Hasbany Richard Hasbany is in the Office of Experimental Education at UCLA. He has published several major studies of the American musical in various journals.Search for more papers by this author First published: Winter 1978 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0022-3840.1978.1203_557.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat VolumeXII, Issue3Winter 1978Pages 557-571 RelatedInformation

Review: Saturday Night Fever by John Badham

Book Review| April 01 1978 Review: Saturday Night Fever by John Badham Saturday Night FeverJohn Badham Marsha Kinder Marsha Kinder Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (1978) 31 (3): 40–42. https://doi.org/10.2307/1211725 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Marsha Kinder; Review: Saturday Night Fever by John Badham. Film Quarterly 1 April 1978; 31 (3): 40–42. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/1211725 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1978 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.