Word: declaim
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...hands have a variety of specific functions. The right often holds the steel-rimmed glasses, occasionally manipulating them when Gorbachev pauses to search for a word. The left hand talks. It can lecture, pointing with one finger, or declaim with the palm up, or thump with its edge on the table, karate style, but always quite gently. It is seldom still. Sometimes both hands work together, the fingers clasped, drumming the table for emphasis...
...stage, on the other hand, is both colorful and suitably. The runaways sing, declaim complain, fight, and run around in the freedom of a worn-down playground, replete with traffic signs and spray-painted graffiti on its wails. The band, visible through a wire fence off to the side, provides a steady but often disengaging sountrack for the runaways, exploits. The show peaks in Act II when the Inner City Breakers, a young street-styled trio, stage a friendly invasion onto the playground and perform some impressive rounds of break dancing. Although visibility could be better, the dancers bring...
...American audiences will like it (he may be right about this). So he has imported Doll Tearsheet from 2 Henry IV and interpolated a low-life scene from that play. And just before the end of the show, after the climactic Battle of Shrewsbury, Coe brings on Falstaff to declaim his long paean to the wonders of sherry sack--which also comes from the later play--and thus mars Shakespeare's carefully wrought conclusion. There are, too, some lines that have been moved from their proper place...
According to Mellow, this story credits Hawthorne with "a rather severe case of fastidiousness at an early age." With similar insight, Mellow describes how, on unexpected occasions, the child would declaim a line from Richard III: "Stand back, my Lord, and let the coffin pass!" This, Mellow maintains, proves that the young Hawthorne "had a dramatic instinct for the lugubrious." These stories are cute, and like most family anecdotes the first few serve their purpose when no real information survives. Nevertheless, they reveal little of substance about the character of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Like much of Mellow's book, they...