Word: diminuendos
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...Broadway theater, the new millennium has started on a note of musical diminuendo. With the demise of Cats, the soon-to-be-missing Miss Saigon and the lack of any new hits from Andrew Lloyd Webber or the Les Miz team in years, the era of the Brit-generated mega-musical seems all but over. Happily, straight plays seem to be filling the gap. Demanding dramas like Michael Frayn's Copenhagen have become unlikely Broadway hits, while the Manhattan Theatre Club, an off-Broadway stalwart, successfully transferred two strong works, Proof and The Tale of the Allergist's Wife...
...following lyricism the choir achieves throughout; "Surely he hath borne our griefs," against the gorgeous background of the orchestral part, is another. Remarkable, too, is the ending of "All we like sheep," which runs "And the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all." The ritard and diminuendo which Finney chooses to take are effective, making these final 15 seconds alone worth the price of the ticket...
...brilliant German Shepherd named Ludwig von Sacher reverts to dog behavior--scratches on the door, piles of feces on the rug--then recovers enough to write in his journal, "I am alone in the world, a ludicrous animal." So are they all alone, and so they die. This diminuendo is unnoticed, except by the journalist Pira, who notes that the attention of the busy world has drifted elsewhere...
...penchant for understatement may help explain his ability to satisfy so wide an audience. He was a master of the graceful exit, the teasing diminuendo. He had a fondness for half-concealing his cleverest effects, so that you might have to read a poem two or three times before you detect the rhyme of "dirigible" with "unmarriageable" or "rosy" with "Mafiosi." Dexterity was simply one of the givens of his work-as was his erudition, his homosexuality, his wealth, his cosmopolitan life...
...production, by Jon Jory, the artistic director of Actors Theatre of Louisville, needs polishing. Most scenes are cinematically brief, but the scene changes are long and noisy. Both acts end with poignant, diminuendo remarks that plainly do not strike audiences as a climax, so applause, although sustained, is painfully slow in coming. While Anne Pitoniak's Du is a tonic blend of folksy approachability and rigid religion, Julie Boyd's Keely seems far better educated and statelier than the beer-loving bar veteran and blue-collar knockabout sketched in the text...