Word: dictional
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...learned and prestigious journals. You can try it, of course, but your experience in edge city, of bleakness and rancor and the humor they generate, becomes a shallow, vicarious one. That at least had been my impression of much of Goldman's earlier work. It was hamstrung in diction and conceptualization between two worlds. So I expected a misshapen book, claiming to be inside Lenny Bruce's soul on one page and attempting to deliver rounded critical assessments on the next. A monster hybrid, half Tom Wolfe, half Lionel Trilling. And I was reasonably close in surmising what Goldman would...
...share the general enthusiasm for it as a stage vehicle. Shakespeare was still an immature playwright when he wrote it, and the quality of the result soars and plunges like a fever chart. Much of the work is too artificial, much of the punning too protracted, much of the diction rhetorically overwrought...
...play's lyricism and innocence, it is at the same time one of the dirtiest in its diction. It teems with smutty puns that would get the work banned by highschool teachers and boards of education if these folks were really up on their Elizabethan lingo. The bulk of the bawdry issues from the mouths of Mercutio and the Nurse, who are the foils to Romeo and Friar Laurence. Kahn has a lot of the phallic and other ribaldry indicated through gesture or mime...
CAROLE Shelley is here an admirable Viola--sprightly, intelligent, and a model of sanity in a world of absurdity. Her diction is clean, and her handling of the "Fortune forbid" soliloquy is particularly distinguished. But there is more beauty in the "damask cheek" speech than she is yet able to convey. (Siobhan McKenna's portrayal remains the yardstick for this part, as for Shaw's Saint Joan and others.) The plausibility of confusion between Viola-Cesario and Sebastian is helped here through Donald Warfield's soft, rather womanly portrayal of the brother (a role once played by a 19-year...
...vocalists, all graduates of one or another of F. John Adams's schools of choral singing, presented a mixed program of sacred and secular music, not all of which was entirely suited to their voices. A set of madrigals early in the program came off particularly well, with good diction and full, robust tone, and a remarkable set composed by Carlo Gesualdo, a madman, was nearly as successful. The bizarre chromaticism of Gesualdo's music may reflect the turbulence of his even more unconventional private life--at age 30 he murdered his wife and her lover, and then finished...