Word: deftly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Nothing, in short, about her prior career hinted that she could be as deft and daring as Harold Lloyd, as rubber-faced as Bert Lahr, as touching as Chaplin -- and more ladylike than Milton Berle. Along with the other foremost icon of the '50s Golden Age of TV, Jackie Gleason, Ball was a larger-than-life talent uniquely suited to the small screen. Her signature series, I Love Lucy, and its successors endured more than two decades in prime time, from 1951 to 1974, one of the few immutables in a sea of social change. Lucy, seen in more than...
...friend to sire his children. But the real problem is that the central character, who is a writer and who presumably stands in for the author, is almost devoid of particularity: his only trait is drunkenness. On the plus side were pungent dialogue, believable family conflict and forgiveness, and deft performances by Anne Pitoniak as a mouthy matriarch and Bob Burrus as her sly brother-in-law. The other play of promise, Charlene Redick's slight but touching Autumn Elegy, depicts a man long withdrawn from the world and his protective wife, now fatally...
Months before a show, Kelly is in high gear. Red sweat pants peeping from under the overalls, he sits high at his drafting table, drawing in deft strokes, crumpling up sketches one after another and sipping hot tea from a tall glass. Interruptions are constant. "No!" he barks, surveying a list of proposed models. "We need someone with de vraies fesses -- a real fanny." The sultry beauties who glower through most French fashion shows must learn to prance, dance, skip and even smile for Kelly's semiannual follies. He dismisses another candidate offhandedly: "Tell her she can do my show...
...Wasserstein is far too deft a satirist, and far too gentle a person, to compose a screed. Instead, with subtlety and humor in The Heidi Chronicles, she has written a memorable elegy for her own lost generation. Heidi tells the story of a slightly introverted art historian, a fellow traveler in the women's movement, who clings to her values long after her more committed friends switch allegiance from communes to consuming. At the pivotal moment in the play's second act, Heidi (played by Joan Allen) stands behind a lectern on a bare stage, giving a luncheon speech...
Tower is enough of a realist to recognize that his chances of confirmation are not much better than the odds that Breathalyzers will be installed in the Senate cloakroom. But his argument serves as a deft reminder that there are also Senators whose alcoholic and amorous behavior might not stand sustained scrutiny. There is just enough merit to Tower's who-is-fit-to-judge-whom bluster to accentuate the confusion over the proper standards of conduct for public officials...