Word: charmers
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Playwright A.R. Gurney Jr. is a cocktail party charmer--funny, deft with words, genially self-mocking and ever ready to step in before the discussion gets too heavy. His best plays, The Dining Room and The Middle Ages, have been set at social events and have had the rambling, episodic quality of witty but wayward conversation. Not surprisingly, a fiftyish college professor who fancies himself capable of shaping an ideal evening is at the center of Gurney's sprightly new puzzle box of a play, The Perfect Party...
What had long worked for the Globe's 400 editors and reporters was the style of Thomas Winship, a gregarious charmer who ran the paper like an Irish pol for two decades before stepping down last year. Janeway, by contrast, was introspective, a cerebral, tautly mannered journalist who had worked at the Atlantic for eleven years before joining the Globe in 1978 as editor of its Sunday magazine. Given Winship's long shadow over the newspaper, a sympathetic colleague observed, "I don't think Mike ever had a chance...
...Pellegrino Italy 550,000 A real charmer with a lively, gentle fi zz. Clear, springwater flavor is balanced and sprightly...
What we see in this wholly enjoyable show is a painter whose high moments (two owned by Paris' Musee d'Orsay, War and The Snake Charmer; two by MOMA, The Sleeping Gypsy and The Dream; and one by a private collector, The Hungry Lion) must be weighed against a good deal of medium-rate work and potboiling. Enjoyment of the lesser Rousseaus is usually tinged with condescension, though at least they are not cute or kitschy, like the truckloads of pseudonaive painting that would sprout from Montmartre to Haiti after his death. They have their period charm; you have...
...jungle sounds floating to him through a screen of lush foliage. He "knew" what the Nile looked like, and the Niger, and the Amazon: muddier and steamier than the Seine, and lined with a frieze of swollen aspidistras. Out of this, on occasion, he could distill incantation. The Snake Charmer, 1907, condenses a huge popular imagery of the noble savage and the mysterious East. Its wonderful flora--the light ocher blooms like hydrangeas or brains, the green, yellow-fringed leaf spears, the oversize blue foxgloves--look forward to Paul Klee. But the black woman with her glittering eyes, wreathed...