Word: craftsmanship
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Frank Gilroy explored his own origins in the bleak, painfully honest drama, The Subject Was Roses. This highly successful film version shows why it was both a popular and a critical success on Broadway and why it went on to win the 1965 Pulitzer Prize. Though Gilroy's craftsmanship is maladroit, he has a musician's ear for the lilt and scrape of Irish-American dialogue, and an unblinking eye that sees his characters whole, in the light of common...
Regrettably Zorba's music does not always reach the level of Prince's craftsmanship. John Kander and Fred Ebb, the composer and lyricist respectively, have still failed to produce the great score that their Flora the Red Menace and Cabaret hinted was on the way. While many of the numbers have uncommonly fine melodies and all are at least a notch above average musically, sometimes they add little to dramatic values clearly evident in the book and staging. Neither of Zorba's solos tell us much we don't already know about the character at the time of the songs...
...tape recording, the voice of Ruth White-middle-aged, pensive, measured and monotonous-fills the box and the theater. The voice is almost sleep inducing, like water lapping persistently at a sea wall. Actress White's monologue consists of some pretentious restatements of the obvious: Art is order; craftsmanship is waning; children in far-off places are starving to death...
...mixture in all this of English and American, humorous and serious, is what gives Sheed's writing its characteristic texture. His crisp craftsmanship seems to come from the English satirical tradition, but beneath this veneer the American grain runs deep: he knows his way intimately around the moral and physical landscape of the U.S. middle class. Sheed relishes the ridiculous but champions the sane and normal. His protagonists are ordinary guys desperately trying to fend off the world's idiocies and evils long enough to define themselves and do the decent thing. They rarely succeed completely. Solitary Baseball...
...sometimes sounded like a lexicon of contemporary clichés: jagged leaps of melody, pointillistic instrumental textures, dryly intellectual twelve-tone patterns. At other times they underlined qualities in Webern's music that have remained fresh and inimitable to this day: delicacy, astringent lyricism, nearly inhuman purity of craftsmanship...