Word: amalgam
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THIS month marks the 276th anniyersary of the first performance of The Fairy Queen before the London rabble. Only Restoration England, as yet uneducated to the subtleties of durchgesungen Italian opera, was capable of producing such an amalgam of song, dance, pagentry, stage effects, and the spoken word--a truly bastard form of entertainment. This particular work is a castrated adaption of A Midsummer Night's Dream liberally interspersed with incidental music in the form of solo songs, ensembles, choruses, and instrumental pieces. With taste and dramatic rectitude thrown to the winds, extravagance is its only excuse and sole salvation...
...winter in which the hippie movement seemed so moribund that its own members staged mock burials in honor of its death, the Yippies have suddenly invested it with new life through their special kind of antic political protest. The term Yippie comes from Youth International Party, an amorphous amalgam of the alienated young that coalesced in Manhattan two months ago around a coterie of activist hippies, all in their late 20s and early 30s. "The YIP is a party-like the last word says-not a political movement," argues the East Village's Abbie Hoffman, who last fall tried...
...From the amalgam of Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees and hardbitten white frontiersmen who settled it, Oklahoma somehow evolved as a state that was not distinctively Western, Southern or Eastern but marked by a conglomerate sectionalism all its own. Today its cultural patterns are Eastern, its outdoor way of life Western, and its political style distinctly Southern...
...today's thriving centers and their replacement by towering retail-office-apartment complexes. Some centers are already growing into such minicities. Developer Raymond D. Nasher has begun work on a "platform city" in Atlanta, and he expects to expand his handsome NorthPark center in Dallas into a similar amalgam of rental housing, hotels and parks. A Cleveland developer this week is announcing plans for a $300 million "Metro City" shopping mall in suburban Euclid; it will include 1,000 apartments, a 400-room hotel, a motel, and a 22-story office building...
Director Finney sets the correct tone for his fable of reality once removed. But charging the atmosphere with a Pinteresque amalgam of the incongruous and the comic is not enough. The film rests on a script by Shelagh Delaney (A Taste of Honey) that settles for cringingly arch character names (Smokey Pickles, Mr. Noseworthy) and a naive blend of symbolism and social critiscism. What is worse, Charlie's contempt for the traps and trappings of wealth cannot hide an underlying self-pity, accentuated by Actor Finney's eyes-closed, O-God-I'm-so-weary...