Word: blurbs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...which refuses to be judged by any consistent set of standards. If it must be genre-ized, it would probably come fairly close to being a bawdy, Gaelic Kaufman and Hart with a bit of Brecht thrown in--a description which however enticing it might look as a publicity blurb, still ignores the fundamental fact that this play is basically an extended music hall entertainment...
Nabokov sums up these amorous doings in a mock dust-jacket blurb that closes Ada by describing only the book's most superficial aspects. Long before he gets around to that, though, a suspicion has set in that the surface love story is as different from the real Ada as a bicycle reflector is from a faceted ruby. More even than Lolita and Pale Fire, Ada is studded with assaults and asides directed at literary forms, figures and fashions. Along with its masquerade...
...news out in any number of ways. There is body jewelry -breastplates made of metal or leather, or vests put together from chains of plastic or pearls. Or the see-through blouse, with a bra of the same fabric but lined (and therefore opaque) to keep the blouse a blurb instead of the advertisement it becomes when worn over nothing. Then there are see-through pants (under them, a matching opaque bikini bottom) and cleavage: vertical in skirts slit all the way up to the waist, horizontal in boleros that cut a wide swath through the midriff and barely remember...
...Spectaror's advantages are not well exploited though. The Ivy Walls yields to the same eyewitness impulse that drives White House nannies to publish their memoirs. They are tempted to tell everything, "just as it happened." The streaming flaming narrative does lend flesh, bone, and color as the press blurb promises; it also jumbles events into a sequence as confusing as living it the first time through. The fine-honed skeleton of the Cox Report may stiffen in its structured divisions and categories, creak in its outline, but it does throw critical events into prominence and leave others...
...musical comedy, didactic medieval morality play, and, in case the audience finds itself laughing at the idea of putting all these elements together, a tongue-in-cheek satire of its own characters and mood. It has something for everyone, and that's probably why it is, as the press blurb announces, "The longest-running American stage production of all time." It has had over 1,400 different productions over nine years...