Word: comic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Throughout the production, Tomarken and Karney convey a wonderful chemistry. Tomarken plays Bennett with just the right combination of effeminate flair and brooding passion. His pensive sighs and pouty fits would make even Hamlet a little envious. Karney's Judd provides comic relief with his caustic wit. At one point Judd deadpans "I don't have to try. I am clever...
Most of these visual gags are references to Hitchcock and in particular to his classic 1951 film Strangers on a Train from which the plot of the movie is partially lifted. But DeVito also has a strong instinct towards the comic hyperbole of the Three Stooges, say, or Bugs Bunny. The sound effects in the film are as exaggerated as cartoons. In one scene when Larry is scrambling to stay on a building ledge, the noise sounds like the sound Fred Flintstone's feet make when he accelerates...
...than his own tumultuously responsive self as the link by which a decaying medium could re-establish its connection with our public lives -- and our secret ones. His elegant disdain helped sweep the boards of the dusty verse drama that then passed for high seriousness, and of the cobwebbed comic conventions that served only a low commercial cunning. His eloquent partisanship opened the doors not just for a new moral consciousness but for fresh forms of theatrical literacy, like Tom Stoppard's bedazzling overstatements and Harold Pinter's hypnotic understatements. At Tynan's memorial service in 1980, the former turned...
Those who have not yet discovered the work of Elizabeth Jolley might well start with this novel. For one thing, it is brief, deceptively simple, eccentric and entirely in keeping with the comic, macabre nature of her best fiction. And it is nice to know that there is more where this comes from. The Newspaper of Claremont Street is the eighth Jolley book, including six other novels and a collection of stories, to be released in the U.S. in the past three years. Prior to 1984, she was one of Australia's best-kept literary secrets. Now her international reputation...
...took out all her anger and craziness on me. From her I get my tendency to hysteria. It was not a great relationship." It never improved: Sondheim has helped his mother financially but has gone through long periods of not speaking to her, and regales friends with darkly comic tales of her attempts to rile him -- making mementos of his shows, for example, but pointedly omitting the flops. Mary Rodgers, daughter of Richard Rodgers and one of Sondheim's oldest friends, describes Sondheim's propensity for writing "eloquent, deliberately mean, really hooty little thank-you notes," and quotes a sample...