Word: clown
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Performance artist. New vaudevillian. Silent clown. However you label limber-jointed Bill Irwin, he is one of the most winsome presences in the American theater. In the sketchbook Largely New York, which opened on Broadway last week, he wears a top hat and spectacles, carries a white cane and resembles an elongated Jiminy Cricket. All around him are people he might befriend, if only he could break through their obsessive isolation with entertainment machines -- a Walkman, a boom box, a video camera, a TV monitor. Irwin himself carries a remote control, purportedly hooked up to the tiers of curtains onstage...
...show in Burden included music by a local radio station, two professional dance groups and a number of acts by children in the clubs. Later in the day, Spunky T. Clown, Smokey the Bear and Alexander the Jester entertained the kids in Bright, which was filled with balloons, game booths and a tricycle obstacle course...
...carries him through an all-stops-out aria from Dreamgirls -- wins whooping applause from this Colosseum of 1,500 self-appointed Caesars. Less appreciated acts -- the Whitney Houston clones and clumsy break dancers -- are pelted with catcalls until a figure known as the Executioner darts across the stage in clown garb and chases them into the wings. Usually the performers soldier on to the end, broken but unbowing. Surely, as starmaker or heartbreaker, every audience member has a fabulous time...
...council reduced important policy issues to clown-show theater. Councilor Tom Danehy ridiculed some of Cambridge's most dedicated and hard-working citizens. Mayor Alfred E. Vellucci wasted much time rambling about mud in basements and textbooks for schoolchildren, as if these topics were pertinent to the issues at hand...
...taking even himself seriously. "No matter how charming and delightful I am," he says, "I knew that people tuned in ((to Wheel of Fortune)) to see the game, not me. Still, 40 million viewers know my name and may look in out of curiosity -- just to see what this clown...