Word: acted
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Editor Sally Fitzgerald has performed a labor of love and an act of model scholarship. When factual information is needed, she gives it succinctly and then stands back. This record of a remarkable life is an occasion for sadness, a reminder of wisdom cut off much too soon. But the emotion that Flannery O'Connor conveyed most often was joy, and this survives intact. Once a correspondent had suggested that someone would write a life of the author. Flannery pooh-poohed the idea...
...danger is salt. Found in even the best irrigation water, salt is usually left behind as crops soak up moisture through their roots, and the residue filters into the underground water table. But in the San Joaquin Valley, shallow layers of impermeable clay act as a natural obstacle, and brackish water has been backing up, already rising to within 5 ft. of the surface over some 400,000 acres. Adding to this mineral buildup is more salt left by evaporation. Crop losses have reached an estimated $32 million a year. If the accumulation is left unchecked, the valley could turn...
During the first act, the strongest part of the show, the five actresses are seventeen-year-old high school seniors who have just been voted most popular, most likely to succeed, best dressed, class clown and class cutie. Ravenal's revue-style production successfully recreates the feelings of sex hungry, adolescent, neurotic, sweetly vicious teenagers. And the exceptional cast manages to hook up the disconnected images of each high school experience and present a picture of what the good old days at least ought to have been like...
...other three actresses, Ravenal, Maggie-Meg Reed and Caroline Rody, all act competently, though without the near complete control over their characters that Woods manages. Ravenal, as Erica, the neurotic, college-boy-chasing, self-appointed court jester neatly portrays some of the ambiguities facing the nubile but nervous seventeen-year-old. But she skirts triteness when she sings a eulogy for her dead grandmother in one of the two "heavy" songs of the act. Reed, as Marion the sex-starved, and Rody, as Laura the oh-so-cute, faithfully depict their personality types' stereotypical reactions to predictable situations. However, they...
WHILE THE ACTING ranged from the excellent to the merely competent, the orchestra was uniformly professional, playing Ravenal's score with remarkable precision. The music caught the moods and feelings of the players throughout the first act. Composed by Ravenal and arranged by her with Pat Powers and Michael Schubert, it flowed from standard pop to jazz to a wonderful Carpenters imitation in the song "Mister Ivy," a song of passionate yearning in which Patti's quest comrades. (Ravenal also demonstrates her knack for a turn of phrase when Patti describes the most meaningful experience in her life--teaching...