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ART AND ENTERTAINMENT BY MDL
managingeditor@thejewishpost.com
INTERNATIONAL STARS
AND CELEBRITIES OF THE MONTH: ILIL ARBEL, ALISON ENGLAND, ERIKA LUCKETT,
PAULETTE ATTIE, LIESL MULLER, NATALIE DESSAY, ROBERTO ALAGNA, ANN PLAGIANOS,
NINA GRUSCHWITZ.
Imagine a world without music!? A sky
without stars?! Empty stages and silent orchestras?! Imagine our lives without
cherished memories, some permissible escapades and days without nights...and
nights without the sparkling voices of bursting talents and captivating
divas!? This could and would be the end of our world, the apocalypse of the
mind and the soul. Fortunately, our world is filled with beauty, tender
whispers, innocent creative madness, flashes of hope and delightfully
beautiful musical virtuosity bursting from within the heart and soul of
Alison England, Erika Luckett, Anne Paglianos, Paulette Attie, Anna Bergman,
the sweet, tender, wise and loving words and phrases of Ilil
Arbel, and perhaps the eternal sacred whispers and exploding
laughters of Melina Mercouri?!
Photo:
Alison England, broadcasting live. |
Imagine a world without the poetry of
Lamartine and Victor Hugo, a world without the screaming
of the bleeding souls of Goya, a world without Brahms, Chopin and
Ravel...a world without children playing with their dolls, cars and
torturing their toys...a world without the smiles and the faces of people we
love...a world without books by Tolstoy, Ilil Arbel, Voltaire, Proust
and Chateaubriand...Everyday, every single dawn and sunset that enters
my life invites me to thank the daring maker of our universe. For I know,
every new day in our lives will bring new hopes, new possibilities, new
opportunities and an ultimate reason for creating, writing, composing, singing
and spreading warmth and beauty around us. Thanks to THE music and THE
beautiful voices of artists, entertainers, even crazy and silly comedians, our
world shines brighter and warmer. Our guests and international artists of the month gave me this
ultimate reason for rejoicing. |
Photo and caption by Suzanne Freeman:
Paulette Attie runs the scales on a piano while students at P.S. 1 in New York
City loosen up their vocal chords. |
PAULETTE
ATTIE: A TRANSCENDENTAL LEGEND FOR ALL TIME
Paulette made both the Jewish and
International lists of the 100 most unusual and outstanding women of the year.
In just one single month, 7 magazines and newspapers in the United States and
Europe wrote glowing articles about this legendary artist. And three times,
her photo crowned their front page and covers! People use to say, legends are
made not created. It is true to a certain degree. The ultimate truth is this:
Legends are nor made, nor created. They are legends! They escape us. They are
beyond our intellectual and emotional measurements. They transcend time and
space. And since when, time and space are or were created? They were before us
and will remain long time after we are gone. And this is WHY we call the best
of us "LEGENDS". When a legend is born like Paulette Attie, we do not take
note. When a legend like Paulette Attie enters the SCALA of our lives, the
shadows and the lights of all understanding and confusion, the sublime and the
absurd intellectualism, the beauty and the provocative, the time and space
mingle, unite, begin to disturb us and confuse the hell out of us. We do not
fully understand the magnitude of their talents and immense impact on us. We
smile, we laugh, we admire them, we applaud them, we gossip about them,
sometime we hate them and envy them...but almost all the time we call them
"LEGENDS". If they have passed away, they become "LEGENDS". If they are still
around, we call them "LIVING LEGENDS". And I have problem with this. Why
LIVING legends? Why not simply LEGENDs, since we did agree that they escape
time, space and the mind of those who naively taught us that we are bound by
time and space. PAULETTE ATTIE is this sort of legend: TRANSCENDENTAL!
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Suzanne Freeman wrote:
September 11 — Before Paulette Attie wrote her song, "United
Are We," she wrote a poem about September 11, 2001. "It was my immediate
response to what was going on in the world," Paulette said. "That took care of
me while I was watching all the horror on TV and could see all the courageous
deeds. Then, I said to myself, I need to write something that will be
meaningful for everybody. That's where the song came from." When the
award-winning songwriter and performer made her work public, she began to
receive standing ovations, followed by some good suggestions. "When I started
singing it to people who are knowledgeable in the music business, they said,
'Paulette, this sounds like a wonderful children's song.' It sort of put a
little bee in my bonnet," she told Scholastic News Online. Her search for
young voices led her to P.S. 1, a 107-year-old elementary school in the shadow
of the World Trade Center. It was the closest school to Ground Zero that was
still open for business. The 650 students of P.S. 1 have rehearsed and
performed the piece several times over the last year. They were featured on
New York 1, a local cable-news program in New York City, and will soon be the
stars of their own music video. But on September 11, 2002, they staged their
own tribute to the victims of 9/11. No media cameras were allowed on school
grounds. The short ceremony, which included a tree planting and the reading of
a poem, was for the students, their parents, and teachers only. "It was
fabulous," said principal Maguerite Straus. "The kids were happy to be a part
of it. They knew it was very special." The entire school met in the outdoor
yard, which is where they were when the first plane hit one year ago. "It was
primary day, and our school was being used for voting," Maguerite said. "We
were ready to start the day with the Pledge of Allegiance when the first plane
hit." |
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Photo:
(left to right) Peter Howard, John Wallowitch, Rod Derefinko, Frances
"Frankie" Gershwin, Paulette Attie, Chuck Prentiss, Bertram Ross. |
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"United Are We" Lyrics by Paulette Attie Right here's the place to be, the time for you and me,
Enjoy sweet harmony because united are we.
Our heroes heard the call, saw their brothers fall,
Still they gave their all, that's united are we.
Don't
need to be a king, don't need a diamond ring,
We've got everything because united are we.
And through the nation wide,
we share the New York pride,
We stand side by side, because united are we.
The reason is simple, it's easy as can be,
When we love one another, united are we.
If I'm a part of you, then you're a part of me,
When we give to each other, we're happy and free.
Don't need remote control, high-techie rigmarole,
Switch on and see the whole, united are we.
And when we're upped and downed, on a merry-go-round,
We can still rebound, turn it around,
We're not lost; we're found because united are we,
Let the words resound: United Are We.
United are we, united are we,
The design is grand, that's the way it was planned,
Let's give ourselves a hand,
Because united are, united are, united are WE!
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WORLD
ART CELEBRITIES JOURNAL called her "The Immortal". LA FEMME MAGAZINE's Louise
de Chambertin wrote: "She is Glorious!". ART AND STYLE MAGAZINE saw in
Attie "One of the greatest American singers-entertainers of our time". |
| Paulette Attie made her singing debut
in a talent show at age 3 (and refused to get off the stage). Since then, she has performed in over 1,000 concerts from Carnegie Hall, the Bruno Walter Auditorium,
Lincoln Center Outdoors, and the Hollywood Bowl, venues in Japan, Mexico,
and Canada, to over thirty cabarets. Paulette graduated Phi Beta
Kappa and number 1 in her class from UCLA and was a showgirl in Las Vegas
one week later. Paulette was selected California’s Sportswoman of the
Year, for which she made numerous TV appearances. TV roles followed
on Love of Life, One Life to Live,
All My Children, Mercy or Murder, General Hospital, Sesame Street, and
the French nightclub singer in the TV movie The Yanks Are Coming (Silver Globe Award). She produced
and performed in a series of yearly concerts at New York's Lamb’s Theatre
and was the inaugural performer at the New York and Riverbank State
Parks. Album: Paulette Performs
Puccini to Porter. Off-Broadway shows saw Paulette as Lady Capulet
in Sensations, Dorothy Parker in Dorothy Parker: A Montage, the Lady
in The Lady Of Larkspur Lotion,
and playing herself in her one woman show, About Time, including songs and poems which she wrote.
She has played the leading roles in the musicals Gypsy, Guys and Dolls,
Can-Can, and Sensations, the
operas and operettas The Bald
Soprano, The Old Maid and the Thief, The Merry Widow, and La Vie Parisienne, and the plays Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, Red
Peppers, You Know I Can’t Hear You...., and The Perfect Party. She is the only American to have
appeared with Le Theatre de France, where she was directed by and performed
with Jean Louis Barrault at New York City Center and toured with the
company in the U.S. and Canada. She played the voice of the French
cat to Mel Blanc's skunk in the cartoon, Pepe le Pew. Paulette Attie's Musical Playbill, 2
years on WNYC AM and FM had distinguished songwriters joining Paulette in
song. In 1979, Paulette founded the National Musical Theater.
She conceived of and wrote Encore, produced by NMT, with Columbia Artists
presenting the national tour. She’s the recipient of 5 consecutive
ASCAP Plus Songwriter Awards 2000 – 2004 and the National Poetry Award,
1998. Paulette became the first woman performer elected into the
Friars Club in 1988. She was the singer for Israel’s 50th Anniversary
in Washington D.C. With numerous articles about show business to her
credit, Paulette just completed writing her first book, The Seven Keys to Live a Masterful Life. And today, THE
JEWISH POST adds: Imagine a world without Paulette Attie. It would look like a
prairie without wild flowers, and a dark sky without a rainbow. Attie is one
of the "ESSENTIALS". |
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