Word: clever
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Director Walton Jones milks every bit of humor from Michael Feingold's adaptation of the clever, pat script. He mocks the cliched plot, deliberately parodying the stylized, silent-movie romance/thriller. Curlicued subtitles announce songs and significant moments; when the gang rob the bank, the lights flash on and off, simulating the flickering early movies. A few touches are a bit cloying--the Fly as telephone operator, for example--but Happy End contains many slyly comic moments. Jones mounts a polished production; the actors sustain a rapid pace that admirably suits his comic intent. Uniformly excellent acting ensures the play...
Presumably, Castro also decided that the evacuation would turn world attention away from the Peruvian embassy fiasco and focus the spotlight instead on Washington's scramble to cope with the flood of refugees. In this, Castro appeared to be successful. "He sure is clever at making his problem our problem," said one White House aide...
...self-enclosed world, described by Talese with popeyed wonder. The author found another answer in the "permissive paradise" of Sandstone, a 15-acre retreat near Los Angeles that flourished in the '70s on a diet of communal nudity and sex. The Sandstone philosophy was not, Talese insists, a clever license for men but a liberation for both sexes: "A sexually adventurous woman could experience, if her mind were willing, her body's capacity to exhaust in a single evening the best efforts of a succession of lusty Lotharios...
...Raymond interpolate dance and mime into the story to indicate the tensions beneath the Renaissance rhetoric. A veil hangs at the back of the stage, behind which a "Duchess of Imagination" flirts while the real Duchess in front disclaims interest in men. This division of the play, though clever, imposes severe restrictions on the actors. Shiels and Raymond allow neither the dancing behind the veil nor the acting in front of it to be subtle. The dancing is blatantly sexual and the acting deliberately one-dimensional...
...strain of his midwifery; to give birth to a new era is hard work indeed. The wonder is that anyone agreed to publish this diary of Toffler's nighttime fears and Newsweek clippings. But there is an explanation. A decade ago, Alvin Toffler wrote a book with a clever computer-letters cover called Future Shock. And even if that effort was not immediately heralded as better than Revelation and installed in the New Testament, it was readable and interesting, an examination of the horrors, large and small, that lay ahead...