Word: charmlessness
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...triangular island where the three streets come together. Built at the turn of the century, Times Tower (now One Times Square) was the odd but lovable younger sister of the classic Flatiron Building a mile down Broadway -- until its terra-cotta exterior was ripped away in favor of a charmless white marble skin in the mid- 1960s. The dowager has been turned into a cheap mummy, yet the disposition of Times Tower remains an architectural cause celebre. Johnson and Burgee once proposed that the building be stripped down to its steel skeleton, gaily painted and lighted -- a wry Piranesian folly...
...point of no return. Political pressure to build new housing for the inner-city poor was intense. Urban renewal, a well-intended and wrongheaded federal mission, in those days meant tearing down quirky, densely interwoven neighborhoods of 19th and early 20th century low-rise buildings and putting up expensive, charmless clots of high-rises. Or, even worse, leaving empty tracts. (The resistance of Charleston, S.C., and Savannah to Great Society efforts to clear their slums accounts for those cities' remarkably intact historic districts today.) In the mid-'60s, 1,600 federally supported urban-renewal projects were under way in nearly...
Musically, the performance is just as diffident. No matter how often heard, the melodic freshets and torrents of Strauss's score should always flow, but under Conductor Jeffrey Tate's charmless time beating, even the famous waltz proves resistible. Te Kanawa displays her shimmering voice to some advantage in the first act, then fades away. As the bubbly chambermaid Adele, Soprano Judith Blegen is unsure of pitch and unsteady of tone, while Baritone Hakan Hagegard inappropriately plays Eisenstein as a staggering buffoon...
...which players are invited to solve a mystery of the multiple-murders-in-a-mansion variety, that he allowed himself no time for dialogue or business that rises above the mechanical. Such good performers as Madeline Kahn, Tim Curry, Eileen Brennan and Martin Mull are driven breathless and charmless trying to keep up with the plot's inane demands. To amend a phrase: Who cares who killed Mr. Boddy...
...newest cable sitcoms are even less adventurous. Washingtoon, which stars Tom Callaway as the dippy legislator, promises a biting look at the ways of Washington, but its political satire is toothless and its performers charmless. In 1st & Ten, the curvaceous team owner (Delta Burke) talks football as if she were reading a foreign language phonetically, and the gridiron goons who surround her (a womanizing quarterback, a dumb lineman named Bubba, an oily general manager in cahoots with the Mob) are well past sitcom retirement age. The bottom drawer in comedy's bargain basement, however, belongs to the new sitcoms showing...