Word: clever
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...generations of star actors, from Walter Hampden to Ralph Richardson to José Ferrer in the Oscar-winning film version. But the movie ran only 112 min.; the R.S.C. Cyrano soldiers on at nearly twice that length. More important, Anthony Burgess's verse translation, while lean and clever ("Our devil's changed into a Christian brother,/ Attack one nostril and he turns the other"), irons out the swellings of Rostand's perfervid rhetoric. The direction, by Terry Hands, who also staged Much Ado, is as antiromantic as the translation. It retreats from the play's signal...
...grow up. And the hooker-dominatrix is really a dark angel who gives herself whole-bodied to her clients' midnight dreams. No less, Turner throws herself headfirst into the film, hyperventilating on the medium's potential for erogenous adventure. This is a clever, daring, mad performance in a movie that is just as reckless. Crimes of Passion and its more lurid brethren in the skin trade are not for everyone, but they should at least be available for any consenting adult to savor or condemn. The porn vigilantes ignore two important partners in a work of fiction...
...school of its recreational notoriety. Dartmouth certainly has a lot of signs prohibiting alcohol consumption in its stadium. But the clever Harvard fans managed to circumvent them, much to the chagrin of 1930's representatives...
...drawing gun-at-the-head cartoons to satisfy some publisher's sobersided crotchets. Appearing in many papers gives them freedom. Absorbed by politics, they have their own biases and constantly interview their own reactions, but they don't often let a rigid partisanship keep them from a clever idea that will express a public mood. Undoctrinaire iconoclasm is their style. They think more in metaphors than in arguments and don't want to dull a witty simplicity with a weighty qualification. Peters says, "We've been drawing all our lives. We were thrown out of school...
BECAUSE Sister Mary" is only about an hour long, the theater offers another Durang comedy, The Actor's Nightmare to flesh out the evening. A mildly humorous play, The Actor's Nightmare is based on one very clever idea that nonetheless runs out of steam very fast. The story opens in medias res when George Spelvin, played by Jeff Brooks, finds himself backstage of a theater where an abrupt stage manager informs him that the play's leading man has been injured and George must take his place. Unfortunately George doesn't even know his own name much less...