Word: comic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...minutes, without toupee or TelePrompTer, Schwarzkopf displayed all the seductiveness of the performer's art. He prowled like a stand-up comic, permitted himself the occasional thin smile, inflected his stats with Bob Hope-style throwaway lines ("But I gotta tell ya . . . "). When asked to appraise Saddam's soldiering skills, he snorted a "Ha!," then launched into a catalog of caustic irony. He tamped his rage into questions intimidating ("Have you ever been in a minefield?") and rhetorical ("Do I fear a cease-fire?"). But the most moving moment came when he caught himself describing the low allied casualty rate...
Allan Gurganus' popular 1989 Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All is an exuberant comic novel narrated by a Southern nonagenarian. Dixie whistles through the stories Gurganus has collected for White People, although the theme of the Lost Cause is rearranged for misplaced lives. The attitudes and manners of Gurganus' characters are small-town first and Confederate second -- even third. Similarly, the author's narrators are perceptive misfits who just happen to be gay. "I've got an extra tenderness. It's not legal," is the laconic observation of one homosexual who is attracted to a pornography fan. In the story...
...cast members are persuasive individually but not yet as a family, although that may come with time onstage. As the matriarch, Irene Worth, 74, lives up to her legendary reputation. But the play belongs to Mercedes Ruehl as Bella. With unrelenting energy, she veers from Gracie Allenesque comic illogic to mistrustful tantrums and wistful dreams. Simon and Ruehl have conceived her as forever adolescent, fated to be poised all her life on the edge of expectation but unable to cross over. If Simon's terrain is the border country between laughter and tears, Bella...
...other words, neither the actors nor Mazursky, whose gift for portraying middle-class muddles (Down and Out in Beverly Hills) is unquestioned, achieves the kind of confident relationship with their material that Goodman and Ward enjoy. Goodman is terrific in his big comic set pieces (notably a decorum- shattering rendition of Good Golly Miss Molly at a royal ball). But even in those he avoids the temptation to broad farce. He and Ward trust themselves to go for something sweeter and more wistful, the tone of the fabulist, and they sustain it with near perfect pitch...
...insane/A humiliating business." This is hardly the typical love-song sentiment. But Stephen Sondheim is not a typical lyricist, and an evening of his persistent cynicism can be quite wearing. Fortunately, the creators of Love is in the Air have coated the bitterness of Sondheim's songs with enough comic relief to make for a delightful experience...