Word: clever
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Sondheim's score counterbalances this by being agile and clever in the way only he can be. But his forte is sophisticated parody, and only in a song called Someone in a Tree does palpable emotion linger. The final impression is that the show belongs to the flagellant school of contemporary American selfcriticism. Whether he means to or not, Prince seems to be arguing that the U.S. opened up Japan by force, sowing the wind of brutalizing social change and thus reaping the whirlwind of Pearl Harbor and global commercial competition...
...parody lies in brevity. The trick is to catch and tickle to death a form's conventions and hastily flee the scene. In a very few minutes any reasonably clever group of comic writers and players can exhaust the rather limited parodistic possibilities inherent in the soaps. Then the problem is what to do next. The only answer, of course, is to do exactly what the soaps do - give the characters some issues to turn over and over in their tiny minds. There is a mass murder down the block, the grandpa who is discovered to be a flasher...
...height of hilarity. In fact, they are depressing. Drawing the characters in the series not from the middle-class world where most soap opera people live but from the blue-collar class where most of their viewers reside seems, like so many Norman Lear notions, condescending rather than clever. Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman is silly stupid, silly stupid...
...guide you."). Prince Tamino, the initiate-to-be, has both ineffable simplicity and moral sturdiness. A trusting character, he's not terribly bright. He understands nothing of the immortal intrigues going on above his head, and proves his virtue by doing everything he's told. Rather than being clever, he is supposed to be pure in heart; today one would call him a sap. Pamina is a first irritatingly childlike--dressed in over-feminine gowns and ribbons, she cries a lot and isn't good for much of anything. But she grows from child to woman in a believably gradual...
Very Good Eddie is a picture-post card show, done without a single lapse of style. Kern's songs are sprightly and unhackneyed, Greene's lyrics are clever, and Dan Siretta's dances are period perfect. Everyone deserves the pleasure of this able cast's dandy company, and David Merrick, who used to send out macabre holiday cards, is obviously wishing all of us a happy...