Word: bravura
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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JIMMY SHINE is an attempt at an inner journey by Author Murray Schisgal. The trouble is that it doesn't go anywhere. Jimmy Shine is a transparent character; to see him once is to know him totally. What makes him a winning loser is Dustin Hoffman's bravura performance. Hoffman takes thimblefuls of humor, absurdity, poignance, honesty, desire and passion and drains them as if they were foaming crystal goblets of dramatic life...
Vibrant Presence. What makes Jim my more winning than his fate is Dustin Hoffman's bravura performance. It should not be confused with acting. Hoffman does not begin to submerge his identity in the role, which is an essential of great acting. He simply projects the vibrancy of his own presence. He looks the way Buster Keaton may have as a child-and like a child, he loves to show off and mimic. He is so obviously pleased with himself when he apes Groucho Marx's loping stance or speaks with W. C. Fields' adenoidal sneer that...
...late-show watchers remember Spencer Tracy's bravura portrayal of Clarence Darrow and Fredric March's performance as William Jennings Bryan in the movie Inherit the Wind, a reenactment of the 1925 Scopes "monkey trial." That classic courtroom confrontation seemed to come from another era, a benighted past when a 24-year-old substitute biology teacher named John T. Scopes was actually indicted for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution in a Tennessee schoolroom. But that era was not so distant after...
...need not worry about his new album. Cliburn's natural equipment is just right for Chopin. He has a powerful and precise technique, a gift for tracing long, soaring lines out of detailed figurations, and an innately tasteful musicality that spurns either maudlin moonbeams or brittle bravura. He puts it all to work in the Byronic B-Minor Third Sonata, playing with dash, sweep and refined lyricism. His performance of the Second, in B-flat minor, offers something more. Although not the performance of a mellow master like Rubinstein, it displays a subtle feeling for the shifting, subterranean currents...
...Vesperae was much more exciting and slightly less well-done. The major problem was the grim Carl Orff assault which soprano Donna Newman made on the sacred coloratura aria Laudate Dominum: all the notes were there, too many of them flat, all of them invested with a Donizettian apocalyptic bravura, Mozart may have been only one year away from great operatic achievement in Idomeneo, but at the moment he was still close by the altar. Miss Curtis seemed intimidated by this Salome-like display but still bettered her prosaic performance in the Schutz. The two male soloists sang adequately, Robert...