Word: deftly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...DIFFICULT TO call agitprop against South Africa hard-hitting; how many pro-apartheid plays get mounted in the U.S.? But THE SONG OF JACOB ZULU, which Chicago's Steppenwolf troupe brought to Broadway last week, redeems its overlong preachments with Eric Simonson's deft direction and K. Todd Freeman's luminous acting of the title role, especially a final monologue in which he unsentimentally uncorks the rage that drove a minister's son to terrorism. What makes the show unique is the unearthly beauty of a capella songs by Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the group highlighted on Paul Simon's Graceland...
...Credit of the director, Vladimir Ragulin, the staging is deft, except for a few of the exit scenes, in which characters continue lengthy dialogue while trapped ambiguously between lines and exit cues. The gender reversal of many of Mamet's male characters--though potentially interesting in light of much current debate on gender--remains undeveloped. As women, these formerly male characters offer no relevant insight into the innumerable questions that this type of inversion could raise...
MICHAEL KELLY'S DEFT, IMPRESSIONISTIC reporting in MARTYRS' DAY (Random House; $23) of a journey around the Gulf War's edges is a useful reminder of what went on. Just before the shooting started, his travelogue of Baghdad ("unusually ugly lampposts") has the flip quality of a travel piece. In Amman, Jordan, violently pro-Saddam, the streets "hummed with a mean joy. At last somebody was killing Jews." In Tel Aviv, he discovers women who deck their gas-mask kits in velvet. After the 100-hour land war, incinerated Iraqi corpses burn off the vapors of his irony; in liberated...
...dare speak to her and dismissed his screen heroism as fakery until he thrillingly discovered that it, like all art, came from deep within. The barren Broadway musical of MY FAVORITE YEAR, which opened last week, turns O'Toole's holy hellion into a soulless self-pitier (a deft if charmless Tim Curry) and wrongly presumes that the film's appeal was its setting amid a '50s TV variety show -- a format joylessly re-created. For the movie's fans, this is a sad waste; for others, a crashing bore...
...with other victims, not knowing who has taken you or for how long or, above all, why. But Irish writer Frank McGuinness finds a trove of snarky pub wit and schoolboy antics in SOMEONE WHO'LL WATCH OVER ME, which last week moved from London to Broadway with its deft West End cast -- Alec McCowen as a prissy English teacher, Stephen Rea as a dissolute Irish journalist and James McDaniel as a tightly wound American doctor. The roles recall the contrived ethnic jumble of old war movies. McDaniel, the most touchingly real, most underscores this falsity...