Word: caste
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...appeal for teenagers lies in the assurance that they can tune in and never be confronted with the image of 1970s star (and eternal guest host) Chevy Chase in a mock game show or a Paul Simon--Edie Brickell duet. Significantly, Mad TV boasts a more balanced cast than its competitor. Among the group of eight there are three women and three black cast members. SNL's larger troupe of 11 features three women and only one black cast member, Tim Meadows...
...late-night TV, the more people who will be watching us," he says, sounding like an abandoned NBC ad campaign. He professes to be unconcerned that the buzz surrounding his show is at the moment dangerously quiet. "We will prevail. As more and more people connect to the new cast members, more and more people will be talking about us." Or, as ostensibly patient NBC entertainment chief Don Ohlmeyer reminded reporters in a speech last month, the show "is a work in progress...
...cast has shown itself to be quite able. There are a number of talented impressionists in the group, including Tim Meadows, who can juggle O.J. and Michael Jackson with a skilled facility. Another high point of the season has been Molly Shannon's disturbed Catholic schoolgirl. As she jumps unprovoked into midair and falls into people and folding chairs, Shannon has proved to be a first-rate physical comic...
WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE OF Virgil Thomson's impish opera Four Saints in Three Acts? Composed to a nonsense text by Gertrude Stein, originally sung by a mostly amateur all-black cast and set against a 15,000-sq.-ft. cyclorama backdrop made of cellophane, the work was a sensation at its Hartford, Connecticut, premiere in February 1934 and quickly moved to Broadway for a six-week run. Ever since, music lovers have been debating what, if anything, it means. "Pigeons, on the grass alas," indeed...
With a work as deliberately stylized as Four Saints was at its premiere, the key is to find its essence--a trick made more difficult by the fact that Thomson, who died in 1989, was an even better gadfly than he was a composer. Hiring an all-black cast, for instance, clearly served a symbolic social purpose in 1934 (though Thomson's rationale--"They alone possess the dignity, the poise and the lack of self-consciousness that proper interpretation of this opera demands"--is patronizing, to say the least). If Four Saints is to find its way into the repertory...