Word: clownishness
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...Garry, Amy Aquino, and the three clownish waiters provide a fine atmosphere as the surly character actors in this sleazy Italian cafe; Skip Mendler is a nicely crotchety old man. Three in this cast, however, seem bent on annoying the audience--Jonathan Prince with his woeful mugging, Caryl Yanow with her too-stiff innocence, and Lisa Popick with a laugh of practiced exaggeration that ceases to be funny the second (let alone the twenty-second) time it is done. George Hamlin leads this production, rescuing an inexperienced cast with rigourously detailed direction. One gets the impression that he has told...
...above, the snowy-headed figure of God (Steve Greechie) is imposing in its decrepitude, but his clownish son (Mark McLaughlin) slips from phony eloquence into spent lethargy more convincingly. Sarah McClusky plays a Virgin Mary who seems to have nothing better to do than buff her nails while listening with annoyance to stories that stop short of raciness with the double entendre that "love grows stronger in proportion as hope diminishes." Prudish as she is, she can still bring off a line about "making it worth your while" with the right swagger...
...imagery as well as of hand writing. An essential, indeed an obsessive, side of Goya is disclosed in the drawings on show by that master: blind beggars, stumpy as turnips, caterwauling for alms in the street; an old woman mumbling to her cat; a man in a clownish cap behind a railing, staring from the page with a dreadful mixture of rhetoric and solipsism, entitled simply Lecura - madness. To see Delacroix's watercolor sketch of a tiger, lying on some imaginary ridge in Algeria with the ripples of its striped back imitating the profile of mountains in the background...
...generations of Americans, Casey Stengel was an essential part of the national pastime-the canny, clownish manager of New York City's worst and best teams, the brand-new Mets and the old-gold Yankees. Hardly a man is now alive who remembers Casey at the bat. For the record, Stengel was a hitter who had a knack for connecting in the clutch. To use his own phrase, he treated the ball as if he hated it-and he sometimes fielded that...
...London Madhouse Company of course has no such tear-jerking Horatio Alger story. It was marketed from the start by the slick professional Playbillpublicity machine, and it has in fact played with phenomenal success in several countries. Still as we watch the red-faced clownish musician attempting to play a dozen battered instruments taped around a bedframe, we can recapture some of the extemporaneous, frantically amateurish flavour of a uniquely American institution that traces its origins to the days of Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo...