Short Takes: Apr. 27, 1992

POP MUSIC

Singing the Same Old Song

FANS OFTEN PROTEST WHEN PERFORMERS move away from the sounds that made them popular. Well, TRACY CHAPMAN loyalists can’t make that complaint. Even though she invited hard rockers like Vernon Reid, lead guitarist for Living Colour, to play on her latest album, Matters of the Heart, Chapman has barely moved an inch since her Grammy-winning debut four years ago. There is some good work on this new album, including Bang Bang Bang, a biting commentary on the causes of youth violence. Chapman’s rich contralto remains as hauntingly effective as ever. But there is a relentless sameness about these songs. Chapman continues to march to her own drummer, but by now that ground is all too well trod.

CLASSICAL

Titanic Tenor

WHAT A CAREER. TENOR PLACIDO DOMINGO has made 79 opera recordings, and his repertory encompasses Verdi, Wagner, Mozart and Puccini, as well as French and Spanish opera. Pavarotti may rival him in vocal beauty, but no singer today is as versatile. So when Deutsche Grammophon set out to recap his two decades with the label, there was plenty to choose from. The first of 10 CDs of highlights to be released this year is Arias, Songs & Tangos. It is a monument to his vigorous musicianship. Over time Domingo’s voice has become darker and richer, his style more fluent and less mannered. The only regret: his masterly Otello, recorded for RCA and EMI, cannot be included.

BOOKS

Soft-Boiler

TRAVEL WRITERS DO YOUR TRAVELING for you, crime writers do your murdering for % you, and food writers eat lavishly at absurd expense so that you need not bother. Such a deal — but hark! Novelist Haughton Murphy does all this and is funny in the bargain. His hero is an elderly, retired lawyer named Reuben Frost, who keeps getting into other people’s trouble. In this seventh outing in the series, A VERY VENETIAN MURDER (Simon & Schuster; $19), Frost and his wife Cynthia are taking their ease in Venice when someone murders an American dress designer. The soft-boiled detective is 77, and when danger threatens, he takes a nap. Or nibbles a nine-star lunch with Cynthia. But in the end he nails the villain briskly, well in time for antipasto.

CINEMA

What Was Oscar Thinking of?

ITALIAN SOLDIERS, ORDERED TO OCCUPY a remote Greek island during World War II, find that all its male residents of fighting age have been interned elsewhere. They pass the war eating, snoozing and making out with the local ladies. The comedy in MEDITERRANEO is as languorous as the climate, and its point — that most of the world’s troubles arise when people are up and doing — is agreeable if facile. The only stirring aspect of this slack, predictable movie is the fact that it won this year’s foreign-film Oscar. There is something wrong with a system that rewards a movie as negligible as this with anything more than indifference — especially in a year when Raise the Red Lantern was a nominee and Europa, Europa did not achieve even that status.

TELEVISION

Un-Animated

TV MADE CARTOONS OUT OF THE JACKsons and Hulk Hogan. Why not try it in reverse, fleshing out a peerless kidvid cartoon of the ’60s? Here’s why. A few years back, Dave Thomas and Sally Kellerman starred as a live-action BORIS AND NATASHA, the spy-in-the-face nemeses of Jay Ward’s immortal Rocky and Bullwinkle. Charles Martin Smith’s film was never released, but it is now being aired on Showtime. Because the small screen has laxer standards for comedy (after all . . . Full House?), you may briefly indulge the strenuously facetious antics, the wisenheimer narration, the cameos by John Travolta and John Candy. Soon, though, the adventure parody gets painful — a kind of Traitors of the Lost Aardvark. Hokey smoke, what’s next? Ted Danson as Clutch Cargo?