Word: comical
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Demons succeeds most impressively, and fails most abysmally, for one reason: the acting. Will LeBow, as the demon Murray (a former comic who sold his soul for the chance to headline in a Catskills hotel), is hysterical. Strutting across the stage with an obnoxious yellow suit and a mouth you wouldn't want to take home to Mother, Murray, "a demon with heart palpitations," is cheesiness at its best. LeBow manages to perfectly capture the air and nature of the typical Kutscher's comic. Brustein's script walks an extremely fine line between the deliciously kitchy and the horribly cliched...
...this delicious collection of personality flaws, twentysomething sophomore author Michael Chabon contructs a wildly comic, manically paced novel, combining slapstick comedy and a clever satire of academia with an ongoing meditation on the peculiar life of the writer. Chabon's light touch allows him to present the most absurd situations, and the most open sentimentality, without a trace of awkwardness...
While the midnight disease is one of the novel's main preoccupations--it begins with the memory of Vetch, as if everything that follows is an elegy on the dark fate of the write--it is probably the least successful element of what is essentially a comic story. Chabon's strength is his witty, graceful, delicately absurd style, and his attempt to turn his comic creations into bearers of a secret curse does not come off. Grady remains a Rabelaisian "minotaur," too devoted to sex, marijuana and adventure ever to seem suicidal; even James is more quirky than disturbed...
...loving, knowing observation of Grady and his world is the novel's greatest strength. When he does not attempt to philosophize, Chabon pulls off his comic stunts with grace, and we can't help but applaud. Wonder Boys is a successful and clever second novel, and it leaves us looking forward to Chabon's third...
...Peter Wood's staging, the play glides cinematically among Indian scenes, Flora's letters home, the scholar's footnotes and reminiscences by Das' son and Flora's surviving sister (Margaret Tyzack) to create a tenderly comic rumination on the ironies of history and colonialism, of creativity and eros-all unexpectedly mellow for the pyrotechnical Stoppard. Art Malik catches Das' contradictory yearnings, caught up in India's independence movement yet in thrall to Dickens and all things English. Felicity Kendall wittily and poignantly plays the free-spirited Flora, who shows Das that only by being true to himself...