Edmonton Journal from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada • 22

rh Ms 'Ti' 5 Entertainment THE EDMONTON JOURNAL, Wednesday, August 31, 1983 F1 5 Applause wasted fine choir's time The Froncysyttte Male Voice Choir at the Jubilee Auditorium By KEITH ASHWELL Journal Staff Writer The aisles were alive with the sound of music on Tuesday night. But there wasn't nearly enough of it. An awful lot of this choir's nearly three-hour program was wasted on applause, Quite a few people wanted to say thank you for the visit of this famously competitive Welsh choir. In turn, musical director John A. Daniel had quite a lot of thank you's for the hospitality that people in British Columbia and Alberta have extended to the choir.

And then of course, there were the performances to be applauded, by the choir, by pianist Karen Jones, who played Chopin and Rachmaninoff rather circumspectly, Ann Hill, who was always just an entertaining soprano, and baritone Ben Parry, whose stylish interpretation and mellifluous tone was under-serviced by the pieces he sang. The choir, which is what we surely came to hear, did not do it-selfjustice. It pandered to commercialism too often with glee club material, pop religiosity and elegant or meant-to-sound-tricky-or-witty musical arrangements. When it sang the traditional songs of Wales or hymns it was a stunningly satisfying instrument, 56 voices positively purring with delicately regulated power. The sustained hush of Calm Is the Sea or the absolute gentleness of the lullaby Si Hei Mwli Mabi, or even the unbreachable loveliness of Iesu Mawr, with such a judiciously tempered bass line here was choral glory.

Oilers' superstar Wayne Gretzky joins the cast of CBS's The Young and the Restless during taping of a show with The Kid, from left, are Jon St. Elwood, Joseph Taylor, and Doug Davidson, and at right, Steven Ford Gretzky as a thug like Woody as Attila The choir has a "Welsh" signature, a particular tenor tone that is somehow Italian and romantic and with a singular but generally controlled vibrato. It was noticeable that toward the end of the program this vibrato was getting a bit large. But the baritones and basses never wavered in their singing. What a foundation of sound! It was a night of indulgence for the Welsh, a night of misty, misted memories.

They were there in that simplest of songs My Little Welsh Home, in the tear-jerker The Holy City, in the assertive Sospan Fach and the tender My-fanwy. Even Ann Hill's rather strident performance of Oh, Silver Moon, by Dvorak, reminded British expatriates of the days when the local operatic and dramatic society and good old steam radio were such sincere and maybe corny mediums of home-made entertainment. That said, it must have come as somewhat of a shock to those folk not born in Wales, who were at the auditorium for the first Overture Concert of the season, to realize that their place of birth was a matter of misfortune. Yes, a night of sentimentality. A pity it wasn't more of a night of sentiment, because this fine choir brought astonishingly pervasive feeling to those pieces closest to its heart and the tradition of the land of song.

Football is a sacred cow on U.S. television, but the stateside TV brass need their network heads examined for the programming blunder we witnessed Monday night. Viewers awaiting the start of the second instalment of The Godfather suffered through the excruciatingly slow waning minutes of a lopsided college football contest, only to find the game robbed almost 30 minutes from one of the great movies of recent time. With Nebraska leading Penn State by 36 points with four minutes to go at movie time, you'd think they could have pulled the football plug and rolled the movie. But KHQ, the Spokane NBC affiliate, was contractually obligated to run the game to completion, including post-game interviews.

If this happens again, we should make them an offer they can't refuse. Of course, it was all in good fun. Nobody expects Wayne to be Marlon Brando. Do they? ITV, due to a scheduling snafu, discovered at noon Tuesday that the Gretzky episode they promoted for 3 p.m. was not supposed to run until today.

To keep the thousands of fans happy who were waiting with bated breath, they ran the Gretzky episode at 4 p.m. and preempted regular programming from 4 to 5. As a result, ITV wasn't planning on running the soap today. However, the Wayne-the-thug episode was scheduled to run today at noon on KREM (cable 6). Gretzky appeared about 35 minutes into the show but it was hardly worth the wait.

Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against Wayne Gretzky. I just wish they'd get him out of my refrigerator. The Edmonton Journal has a nickname in Hollywood. They call us The Gretzky Gazette.

The reason for our nickname was on TV Tuesday afternoon, playing a thug on the daytime soap, The Young and the Restless. That's like casting Woody Allen as Attila the Hun. No. 99, the Mr. Nice Guy of the NHL, didn't exactly pull off a believable performance as a hood.

If they wanted an Oiler to play a gangster, they should have gotten Semenko. Wayne Gretzky is better suited for milk commercials. The soap appearance was one of several TV shows taped by Gretzky this summer in Los Angeles. That's right, fans. Not only do we have Wayne Gretzky milk cartons, Wayne Gretzky wallpaper, Wayne Gretzky bedsheets and Wayne Gretzky cereal now we have Wayne Gretzky TV star.

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