Word: comical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...little for being too smarmy, and not nearly charming enough--but still manages a strong performance. And honors for a show-stopping effort go to Jim O'Brien, who brings to the part of Bud Frump--the boss's maddeningly wimpish nephew--not only an impressive comic flair, but also the best singing voice in the cast. O'Brien's clear, powerful solos in "Coffee Break" and "Gotta Stop That Man," the two best-staged production numbers, do full justice to Loesser's music...
...life (and more than a few deaths) as it moves along. McMurtry tosses off a few good Sam Spade-ish one-liners (an aging producer toasting in the poolside sun is a "ninety-year-old french fry"), and a pair of good-ole-boy screenwriters from Texas provide boisterous comic relief. McMurtry, who knows the Hollywood milieu firsthand, reveals a nice sense of place and trade. The celluloid scene has been done before; what McMurtry gives it-as he gave that sour Texas town in his The Last Picture Show-is a sense that even the meanest lives deserve...
...once, he tries to show what else he can do as an actor. As it turns out, he can be quite funny. There are some hilarious bits in which he fends off real and imagined enemies on New York's mean streets; his performance takes on a violent comic vitality that only rarely spreads to his direction and writing. Like the rest of the film, the star is at his worst when he lays on calculated doses of sentiment and sensitivity; at such times, Stallone seems more in touch with imagined demands of the box office than...
Gogol produced the play in 1842, and the plot has been a staple in many lands: the comic trials and tribulations of marriage brokers and their clients. Fiokla (Barbara Bryne) is an accomplished matchmaker, but she has something of a problem bride-to-be in Agafya (Cara Duff-MacCormick). Agafya is a mer chant's daughter and a bit of a ninny. The three suitors Fiokla lines up are chauvinist piglets. Ivan Pavlovich Poach'tegg (Jon Cranney) is a blustery, pompous bureaucrat. Poach'tegg (sometimes translated Omelet) is only after Agafya's property, a two-story...
...yeasty comic genius of the play rests with a totally reluctant fourth suitor, a court councilor named Podkoliosin (Peter Michael Goetz). Russian inertia runs like psychic sludge through Podkoliosin's veins. He is a precursor of Goncharov's famed character Oblomov, who could barely make the effort to get out of bed. When it comes to marriage, Podkoliosin can scarcely contemplate getting into bed. But he is sponsored and goaded by his friend Kochkariev (Alvin Epstein), a born busybody. Epstein, in his first season as artistic director of the Guthrie, animatedly embodies the temperament...