Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...better kept to myself," declared English-born Maud Shaw when she left the service of the Kennedy family last summer. Unsurprisingly, she has changed her mind. Her little trickle into the flood of Kennediana includes some nursery-level characterizations of the children (John is "the clown . . . a natural comic," while Caroline, like her mother, is "the quieter, more reserved of the two, slow to make friends") and a few intriguing anecdotes. There was, for example, the time when Caroline first became aware of people's color. Once she noticed that she was turning brown in the sun at Palm...
...pleasant enough evening, but let's face it--why Don Giovanni, of all operas? Harvard-operatic productions, beset by obvious limitations, suggest several rationales--a training ground for student singers; an opportunity to present neglected works; and, most simply, straight entertainment, inevitably of the comic sort. The Eliot-Leverett collaboration, however, imported all but one of its seven principals from outside Harvard and turned them loose on a masterpiece that is easily maimed in performance and only too notorious for its structural lapses and dramatic incongruities. Far sounder cases can be made for the recent Lowell productions, House Afire...
...broadening was vigorously displayed in his masterpiece, a 972-page trilogy (Men at Anns, Officers and Gentlemen, The End of the Battle) which is now widely considered the best British novel of World War II. In the trilogy Waugh creates in Apthorpe his greatest comic character, a Falstaff as funny, as tragic, as human as the huge original; but what matters more is that here for the first time the author accommodates in a single opus all the dominant elements of his life and art: satire, language, religion, sense of tradition, instinct for milieu. The consummation is a social history...
...John Lithgow and Jane Mushabac apparently have no use for heroes, heroines, or straight men of any sort. Strephon, the young shepherd who is fairy from head to waist and mortal on down, is usually played by romantic-lead types. Lithgow and Mushabac have cast an out-and-out comic in the role, and given him plenty of room to operate. Phyllis, the shepherdess Strephon loves, is pretty much of an ingenue part, but at Agassiz she is played mostly for laughs...
...scenery by Robert Randolph seems to have come straight out of the comic books. Metropolis's skyline is faultless. The Daily Planet, Clark Kent's apartment, City Hall, and scores of other familiar landmarks move effortlessly on and off the stage. Unfortunately, Superman himself is another matter. The wire he dangles from looks like a cable thick enough to hold the Queen Mary. And the illusion of flying is hardly enforced if you sit at the side and see Holiday waiting high up in the wings for each of his entrances...