Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, December 24, 1994 TAG: 9412290022
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RON MILLER KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The week after Christmas is not prime viewing time, so the networks usually don't load up the schedule with lots of first-run goodies. They figure most of us are returning gifts or falling asleep in front of the TV set, groggy from stuffing ourselves with holiday leftovers.
But you can count on this one great post-Christmas attraction every year from CBS - a holiday tradition that seems to get better year after year.
The basic idea of the honors has remained the same since they began in 1978: to pay tribute to the very best in the arts by honoring artists for an entire lifetime of achievement, not just a very good year as the Oscars, Emmys and Tonys do.
For that reason - as well as the extraordinary taste exhibited in the conduct of the awards ceremony each year - the Kennedy Center Honors have become our nation's supreme recognition of excellence in the arts.
That exquisite tastefulness - and the fact that classical music, opera and dance are included - may account for the reputation this show has for being an ``egghead entertainment.'' Though it's a high-class show, it's also one that can get down and boogie when it needs to - and it has done so quite a lot over the years.
And though the live performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., is always presented before the president and first lady, it never descends to politics. President Reagan sat through many a tribute to some notorious old left-wing cultural heroes and seemed to enjoy their company immensely. (The honorees sit with the president's party.) And, if he hangs around long enough, President Clinton is bound to find himself having a good time with some equally notorious cultural icons of the far right.
That's the beauty of the honors: They fall upon artists who have endured the test of time, including whatever the politicians could throw at them, and emerged as living artifacts of their era of greatest accomplishment.
It's also important to note, in this time of growing animosity toward immigrants, how many of our greatest artists have come from that group, arriving here with nothing but their talent and ambition but invariably giving the country much more than they took in return. Twenty-two honorees have been immigrants and many more have been first-generation children of immigrants.
Filling that tradition this year is actor Kirk Douglas, the son of poverty-stricken Russian immigrants who named him Issur Danielovitch and gave him one great legacy - a fierce determination to make a place for himself in America.
Douglas, who turned 78 this month, was a star in his very first movie, ``The Strange Love of Martha Ivers'' in 1946, and remains one today, starring recently on NBC in ``Take Me Home Again.''
Douglas is the quintessential Kennedy Center honoree: a self-made man who lived the American dream, providing us with an unbroken stream of first-rate work in films and on television.
His fellow honorees this year represent the broad canvas of the Kennedy Center program:
Soul singer Aretha Franklin, 52, daughter of a Baptist minister, who coalesced the music of her people and her religion into a vibrant, hard-driving style that made her the Queen of Soul in the 1960s when black Americans were making their greatest push for equality.
Composer and conductor Morton Gould, 81, a child piano prodigy whose education was interrupted by the Great Depression of the 1930s because he had to leave school in his teens to help support his family. From a humble job as a vaudeville accompanist, Gould rose to become one of the world's foremost conductors and composers of orchestral works.
Producer/director Harold Prince, 66, the young protege of legendary George Abbott, who has ruled Broadway for four decades, presenting a steady string of innovative musical shows from ``The Pajama Game'' through ``Phantom of the Opera,'' while providing the launching pad for such theatrical talents as Leonard Bernstein, Bob Fosse, Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Singer, songwriter and social activist Pete Seeger, 75, who may be the most influential folk artist of the 20th century, a man who has distilled the many sources of America's greatness into the songs that have been the battle hymns of the great social movements of his age - ``If I Had A Hammer,'' ``We Shall Overcome,'' ``Turn, Turn, Turn'' and ``Where Have All the Flowers Gone?''
Unlike so many other award shows, in which the honorees get up and perform or at least make speeches, the Kennedy Center Honors chooses instead to treat them as artistic royalty. They sit in their box, wearing their medals, and watch some of the great artists they've inspired pay tribute to them with their own performances.
Somehow that notion of a distance maintained between artist and audience works wonderfully well. Each show is filled with poignant moments and more than its share of grateful tears.
For many honorees, the ceremony represents a last hurrah, the nation's highest and final tribute. And, for the TV audience, it almost always amounts to the last great entertainment of the calendar year.
by CNB