Word: acted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Expanding on the theme of mortality, the concert opened with Bartok's The Miraculous Mandarin, Bartok's own exploration of life and death. This one act opus was more of a pantomime than a musical suite. In fact, it was almost a miniature play. While there were no actors, no costumes, no sets, there was one staple of drama--an unmistakable storyline. Ozawa took the role of the narrator and the instruments assumed the voices of characters. The Miraculous Mandarin's format was vaguely reminiscent of the children's symphony, Peter and the Wolf. Its plot, however, was drastically different...
...most appealing about Richman's music, aside from general excellence, is its unironic appreciation of life, rare in today's hipper-than-thou culture. Richman is never less than totally honest and earnest and although he is aware of this and its effects, he is never putting on an act; he's just being Jonathan. This was very apparent when he played to a packed downstairs at the Middle East on Nov. 2. With just his guitar and drummer Tommy Larkins, Richman played one of the most entertaining and energetic live shows I've seen in a very long time...
...second is the acting, the two standouts being Maguire, who gives a beautifully nuanced performance as the film's emotional center, and Joan Allen as his (Pleasantville) mother: independently and together, they account for nearly all of the movie's most poignant moments. The fact that Allen plays the same role she always does, i.e., the repressed wife/mother figure with a hidden reservior of intense feeling, would be more annoying if she didn't do it so superbly, exactly right. Next to her, William Macy is merely adequate, though often quite funny, as the impotent and increasingly bewildered father figure...
...ACT claims it went public now to gauge the acceptability of such research and to help decide whether to commit money to it. But peer review is going to be tough, given that it's unlikely that any serious scientific journal will publish ACT's skimpy material as it stands. Nor will the market make anything out of it -- ACT has no IPO on the horizon...
...They could have given a little more assurance as to what was being done here," said Dr. John Gearhart of Johns Hopkins -? one of the authors of a successful study released last week in which stem cells were created from dead human embryos. ACT's experiment is raising eyebrows because cows and humans took separate evolutionary paths more than 10 million years ago; the two cell nuclei are so different that they're unlikely to stick together for long. "There's no reason to believe this thing would get past a few cell divisions," says Elmer-DeWitt...