Word: comic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Editors. What really accounts for the giveaway's new appetite for news is its hungry reader. Too many metropolitan dailies, striving to be all things to all readers, have turned into a ready-mixed potpourri of syndicated columns, global think pieces, comic strips, canned features and coleslaw recipes. Local news continually comes in last. Without exception, the giveaway newspaper lavishes all its news attention on the local scene, and leaps with alacrity to publish home-town names...
Bubbles & Wreaths. Once the reader overcomes the resentful suspicion that the fractured-telegram style of interior monologue must take less time to write than to read, he will find Smith the most lushly loony character of the year. Donleavy simply cannot help being comic even when the symbols and portents crowd thickest. The narrative interest-such as it is-centers on Smith's love for Miss Tomson, a genuinely imagined dream figure of sexual grace who will never become a member of the wedding. She dies, of course, and is buried at sea. Darkly Byronic to the last, Smith...
Murray's production succeeds in almost every other respect. The scenery is quaintly French, the sound effects--bellowing beasts and thundering herds--frightfully realistic, and the two bedrooms scenes deftly staged. Ionesco's dry comic touches exude his French sense of humor and the final scene in Berenger's room could be quite powerful with a suitable player. If Barend learns to act, the Rhinoceros will be a welcome guest in Boston...
Evident throughout the show is the silent hand of director Dean Stolber. Stolber's staging, especially in the telephone scene, shows remarkable comic sense. And the choreography, handled by both Stolber and Miss Ware, is positively inspired. The singing may be ragged on occasion, and the ham a little overdone, but Bye Bye Birdie fairly rings with gusto and life...
Playing opposite Medearis, who is wonderful, is Lynn Milgrim as the old lady, and Miss Milgrim is even better. She handles her complex part with the versatility that Claire Zachanassian's changing mods require. Her role is the central one in the play: Miss Milgrim must be comic in one scene, tragic in the next, and tragicomic the rest of the time. She moves from being old and bitchy to being sad and tender with astonishing ease. The scene in the forest when she sits with Medearis who knows he will die that night is the most moving...