Word: cardboard
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...author's eye. White's weakness is for melodrama. A little of this occurs in her first novel, well covered by the hard accuracy of the setting and the characters. The conflict between father and daughter almost saves The Lost Traveller. The later books, which introduce cardboard men, are too high-flown. But in Frost in May, White wrote a permanent, crystalline book about a vanished world and a universal experience. -By Martha Duffy
...three crucial supporting roles, only Christopher Randolph as Dr. Rank manages a solid, thoughtful performance. Jonathan Spalter makes Barnstrom--again, an unnecessary Americanization from Krogstad--a hilarious cardboard villain, right out of The Perils of Pauline. He clenches his teeth, he points accusingly, he leans over chairs menacingly, he rubs his palms in sadistic glee. If he had a moustache, he'd sure to twirl it with fiendish rigor. As Kristine, his long lost love, Kim Bendheim seems vaguely robotized. Their climactic scene together is a wet firecracker...
They need not have wasted their cardboard or their chants. The Broadway adaptation of Lolita forestalled them. After bombing in Boston, it limped into New York to be greeted by financial difficulties, internecine strife and 60 or so members of a feminist group called Women Against Pornography...
...SHORT, THERE'S too much cardboard here, and not enough flesh and blood. A symbol only becomes significant in its power to move masses, but Ward's symbols are devoid of that power. Too often long speeches only rework cliches or lapse into sententiousness. Eager to stress the rift between the revolutionaries and the church, Ward sacrifices the richness of characters and motives to emphasize their polarization...
...begins his Nemorino with a strong tenor voice and a characterization even more bumbling than the plot requires, but the magical elixir appears to ease his stiffness. His second-act aria to Adina surmounts the frilly animation of the production, creating, somehow, a wrenching summer-night sweetness between the cardboard storefronts...