Word: comic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...exceptions the supporting cast might be accused of nonsupport. Hume Cronyn's Polonius is devilishly fine, a battered human filing cabinet of platitudes who has achieved diplomatic immunity to everything but the sound of his own voice. And George Rose's First Gravedigger is a roguish, low-comic word prankster. But Alfred Drake's King Claudius is too suavely ingratiating to have killed a brother and seized a crown. He is more like mine host of the Elsinore Hilton. Eileen Her-lie is a middle-aged matron with diction; it is easier to imagine her at bridge...
...earthbound Nijinsky who can entrechat her way across a stage in half-inch leaps. Footwork is needlework to Bea-she crochets with her toes. If playgoers dare to laugh at her outlandishly comic bits of business, she freezes upon them the look of an embalmed codfish until they burst out laughing all over again. Her costumes are designed by the Mad Hatter...
...this is remarkable because Mr. Cooper has so many people in his Dogpatch. More than forty characters parade across the stage, all of them in splashy, comic strip costumes. Only a few mistakes could have produced a traffic jam as embarrassing as the one expected at the World's Fair. But there is no congestion, and Mr. Cooper has succeeded in making Al Capp's Dogpatchers more than a collection of slightly improbable freaks...
...Platonov admits. By alter-chaser, that's what I am," Platonov admits. By alternating pledges to take up and break off extra-marital escapades, he invites insults, homicide, suicide, and laughter. While the plot thrives on surprise entrances and simultaneous incidents this boobish Casanova slides toward his comic doom...
...this early play, written at the age of twenty-one, Chekhov was already a master of comic technique though he strongly foreshadows the sulking self-mockery in his later pieces. Resemblances to later plays in A Country Scandal may be partly due to the able work of Chekhov's translater Alex Szogyi. Szogyi judiciously pruned the manuscript down from six to two and a half hours of curt speeches in contemporay idiom, broken by endless exits and entrances. The "few liberties" which the translater took "for the sake of fashioning a coherent play" almost certainly improved on the original, bringing...