L OOK in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also call’d No-more, Too-late, Farewell
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In Ian McKellen's Acting Shakespeare, he tells the wonderful old story of actor-manger Sir Donald Wolfit's astonished (and possibly horrified) reaction to the news that the great dancer and choreographer Robert Helpmann was planning a ballet of Hamlet: "You're going to dance Hamlet, Bobby?" "Why not Donald? You've been singing him for years!" What many might miss in the story is Helpmann's dominant (and indeed horrifying) presence in pop culture -- as the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!
Ballad in the Streets of Buenos Aires And a man waits in the streets and meets a woman precise and beautiful as the clock inside her room and sad and white as the wall that holds it And she does not show him her teeth and she does not show him her belly but she shows him her time, precise and beautiful And she lives on the ground floor next to the pipes and the water which goes up starts at her wall and he has decided on softness And she knows the reasons for weeping and she knows the reasons for the holding back and he begins, and he begins to be like her And his hair grows long and soft like hers and the hard words of his tongue melt in her mouth and his eyes in tears will look like hers And the traffic lights light up her face and she is standing there in the permitted and the forbidden and he has decided on softness And they walk in the streets which will be in his dreams and the rain weeps into them as into a pillow, and res...