Word: banally
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Delightful at its best and generally fun, Fiorello! does have its weaknesses: a few flop songs and scenes, and a less lively second act. The show's chief liability is that bane of musicals, love, which-requited or unrequited-can seem banal. Even so, the show's chief asset. Director Abbott's testing everywhere for pace and pep, helps to shorten the doldrums. And for the evening as a whole, the reaction to the Abbott test is decidedly positive...
...transformed into a postulant-a snappy little Spanish teen-ager with an Irish face (Carroll Baker) and something of a Bronx accent. The Tempter appears as the usual dashing dragoon (Roger Moore). The Reinhardt visions are reduced to a banal catalogue of wide-screen wonders, filmed in what is apparently intended to be glorious Goyacolor...
With its prolixity and banal poetizing, The Great God Brown is as heavy with fog as it is lacking in flesh. Opening its seventh season with so tough a challenge, the Phoenix Theater could not meet it in production. As the best way of sustaining interest, Director Stuart Vaughan makes use of the stylized and the histrionic. Now and then, the tricks are vivid, but the gaudy orchestration only stresses the hollowness of the music...
...half of the issue (it starts from both back and front and reads into the middle like a high school humor magazine) is devoted to the poetry of Mark J. Mirsky, David Landan, and Thomas Weisbuch, all Harvard undergraduates. Mirsky's poems are mostly short, tight sketches, upon banal subjects, revealing a certain sensitivity, but constantly becoming fouled in their own language. There are technical errors in many of these poems, inaccuracies of expression, inconsistencies in metaphor (even louts, when angry, do not grin, etc.) and a rough, amateurish quality in word choice. There is, however, a certain crude gentleness...
...details of the starcrossed love affair, and the father of the family tries to burn them, to "protect my sister." But the sense and compassion of Elsa, who has suffered through the same type of romance that Alison had, saves the poems for the world. It's as banal as that. To make matters worse it has some totally unactable lines, such as one that one of the members of the family utters as he reads the new poems, Eben (low, and in beautiful excitement), "Why that bird sang thirty years ago--and sings now." Despite all this, Alison...