Word: comic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...MOST GLORIOUS COMIC ACTING ON film, Peter O'Toole played a washed-up swashbuckling movie star, raddled with debauchery yet oddly innocent. The man journeyed hours to glimpse an estranged daughter but did not dare speak to her and dismissed his screen heroism as fakery until he thrillingly discovered that it, like all art, came from deep within. The barren Broadway musical of MY FAVORITE YEAR, which opened last week, turns O'Toole's holy hellion into a soulless self-pitier (a deft if charmless Tim Curry) and wrongly presumes that the film's appeal was its setting amid...
Childhood-as-salvation appears frequently, usually to better effect, as in the wistfully comic ```Wild Boys of the Road''': "And there's the happy one,/so little she was excused from most occasions." This kind of praise for childhood as innocence, of course, is only possible for those who have left it entirely behind--if you really are too little to understand, you don't know what (sorrows) you're missing. If there is hope of poetic continuance in Ashbery's cosmology, it is in another, more plausible vision of childhood regained, a vision of childlikeness as a triumph...
...instant of choice, but the instant before, in which these poems take place. If that denies Hotel Lautreamont the chance to affirm any one view of life or mind, it is, surely, a small price to pay for lines, views, forms, surprises, ideas and indeed whole poems so various, comic, sad, elegant and moving as the many in Ashbery's new book...
...albums capture the qualities that make her recitals sellout events. Bartoli grabs the audience. She sings with her eyes too. In Rossini, who has lavish comic zest, she courts the phrases and the audience as well. She displays, as Levine says, "an exceptional instrument, personality, grasp of the music and the text and, most of all, the ability to communicate all this...
...Judy Slattum (Chronicle; hardcover, $29.95; paperback, $18.95). According to the Balinese, their religion is monotheistic; but their God "takes as many forms as the sun has rays." The most dramatic of those forms are here, along with scores of other stark, comic or beautiful masks. Each is exquisitely carved; all express the yearning of an ancient and still dynamic culture...