Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...DROP OF ANOTHER HAT brings an antipodal pair, Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, back to Broadway once more with a jaunty, sly revue in what they call "the theater of kindness." They scramble their comic omelet with such pixy princeliness that It becomes a royal banquet of mirth...
...SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL and RIGHT YOU ARE. Sheridan's bastion of busybodies provides a showcase for the comic talents of the APA repertory company, and Pirandello's dramatic investigation into the nature of reality affords them the opportunity to keep the philosophical ball rolling with a light touch...
VERDI: FALSTAFF (3 LPs; Columbia). Verdi's last opera, an ebullient celebration of love and life, was written when he was 79, and Leonard Bernstein has captured all of its beauty and range. The entire cast exploits the comic possibilities in the music, but Regina Resnik as Dame Quickly and Graziella Sciutti as Nanetta stand out-along with the redoubtable Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who, as Falstaff, makes his voice convey everything from arrogance to cravenness to humiliation. At times the mirth seems about to explode in all directions, but Bernstein's firm hand directing the Vienna Philharmonic gathers...
...common to all these stories from the dual Anglo-American tradition as well as European sources, it is the concern for fiction as a revelation of the truth. The private vision, because it seeks no corroborating evidence, must carry conviction of itself. It is this seriousness-even in the comic vein of a Saul Bellow-which makes Jean-Paul Sartre's satirical portrait of a protoFascist, Childhood of a Leader, seem as frivolous in this company as a mere cartoon. The same quality makes the similarity-a glum but grimly maintained Freudo-Marxist determinism-between Doris Lessing and Italy...
...This comic picaresque stuff is so easy to read that the reader might fail to notice Céline's didactic intentions. Courtial is Yongkind, grown up and equipped with a degree from the polytechnic, but the same optimistic cretin. In the person of Courtial, Celine pours all the vitriol of his prose on an age that believed science and progress would confer inestimable benefits upon mankind. Courtial's windy rhetoric on the subject of these benefits is mocked by the hiss of hot gases from his chronically punctured blimp. By the time the first great technological...