Word: comics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...such original comic novels as The Free-Lance Pallbearers, Yellow Back Radio Broke Down and Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed displayed powers of camouflage, mimicry and verbal play that drew praise from his peers-though very little cash from his publishers. As a black writer with a ticklish touch, Reed had to sit in the back of the literary omnibus until the white audience tired of having their heads whipped by the Cleavers and Joneses...
...that there are some opera lovers somewhere who have never had the chance to observe Sills at work. If so, they will want to be at their TV sets next week when Sills stars in a two-hour presentation, in English and color, of Donizetti's 1840 comic opera Daughter of the Regiment (PBS, Monday, Oct. 14). Taped last summer during an actual performance at the Wolf Trap Farm Park for the Performing Arts outside Washington, D.C., Daughter marks Sills' first appearance on TV in a complete opera. It is also a highly amusing adornment of Sills...
Daughter lacks the stature of Donizetti's comic masterpieces Don Pasquale and L'Elisir d'Amore, but it does provide Sills with countless opportunities for lambent fioriture, whistling-high E-flats, and howling farce. Her windup salute, which starts somewhere near her right thigh and then circles deliciously upward, has to be seen to be believed. So does the way she gives her dancing master a knee in the chin, or wraps him around her neck while learning to do the quadrille...
...European fascism. But Amarcord never becomes preoccupied with the phenomenon. Fellini works the politics evenly and gracefully into the fabric of the whole movie and portrays fascism as a crackbrained aberration that allowed for some moments of ritual absurdity even as it brought forth a kind of cagey, half-comic defiance. One of Amarcord's most memorable episodes concerns the playing of the socialist anthem from atop a church steeple, an incident that is part practical joke and part moral gesture; it implies a kind of human resiliency more moving than any call to arms...
...final act. It is difficult to balance tragedy and comedy, and the play often lapses into a no-man's land somewhere in between. Kanin might do well to cut a scene or two. A scene with a visiting Zionist lecturer, for example, fails miserably. It neither provides comic relief nor advances the story...