Word: blanded
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...Sherman brothers' rather bland musical score is for the most part tolerable, even though many of the lyrics seem womewhat stilted and pointless. The indefinite and indecisive nature of the music itself (is it supposed to be Dixieland or isn't it?) reminded this listener of much of the lesser material found in Disney's Mary Poppins, an earlier Sherman-Sherman songwriting opus...
...time when figures like Edmund Wilson and Mark Van Doren did not consider it beneath them to comment on Disney creations). Partly it is because the general audience has allowed itself to believe that the acceptable range for family fare is a narrow one, encompassing cuddly animals, bland costume pictures enlivened by painfully obvious song-and-dance numbers, and not much else The enthusiastic reception for the older, gutsier Disney features and animated shorts at the Lincoln Center retrospective ought to demonstrate that there is a hunger for something more...
...Lady Fidget of Christina Pickles comes off best, though more vocal modulation would help. As her sidekicks Mrs. Dainty Fidget and Mrs. Squeamish, Grayce Grant and Joan Pape provide their quota of amusement. Curt Dawson and Ronald Frazier (who likes to smoke a long clay pipe) are a trifle bland as Harcourt and Dorilant, two gallants who envy Horner's success. Rex Everhart, as Sir Jasper, is foolish enough but lacks class, and should be told that the game is blindman's-buff, not blindman's-bluff. David Rounds, with beauty spots on his right chin and left cheek...
Maintaining that same detachment from the reality of the crisis, Nixon picked up a two-year-old speech invitation from Florida Technological University - to the astonishment of officials of that 6,600-student Orlando institution. He delivered a bland and conventional commencement address without mentioning Watergate or the crisis in Government even once. Instead, he repeated his familiar 1972 campaign theme. "There is somewhat of a tendency to have our television sets in undated with what is wrong with America," he complained. "I think it perhaps would be well to start with the proposition about what is right about this...
...Rabe's three dramas. The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel turned a man into an infantry cog and spun him off to combat and death. In Sticks and Bones, which CBS refused to air after complaints from local stations (TIME, March 19), a blind veteran returned to his bland-as-cornflakes family and found that they could not stomach his 20-20 insight on the U.S. and the war. In The Orphan, at off-Broadway's Public Theater, Viet Nam is not actively present except as Rabe attempts to relate it to the problem of evil throughout human...