Word: droll
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...enough alone, perhaps because their errors are errors of the heart. Who but a genuine innocent-in outlook, if not in conduct-would be so bold or dumb as to put his life on the line like that? Not a Frenchman, certainly, who would regard a scandal as droll; nor an Englishman, to be sure, who would regard it as an honor. No, only an American would blunder forth as in the Agee case, openly advocating fair play, the merit system, and the rights of privacy within the same declaration. Only an American would be so impatient as to prevent...
...Laraine Newman) who leaves Herschel to tryst with Goliath and is turned into a pillar of salt. Even in A.D. 1980, the wrath of God should not be ignored: for He brought upon this production a plague of unfunny punch lines and lackluster performances. There are a couple of droll sight gags (Goliath's oversize undershorts hanging out to dry; Coco at work in the pharaoh's palace, trying to sweep up hundreds of frogs with a dustpan and broom), but nothing can redeem Wholly Moses! from its destiny of eternal mirthlessness. It is a tattered Torah indeed...
MOST OF SELLARS' Inspector General understandingly subordinates the moralizing inherent in Gogol's near religious allegory to its boundless wealth of burlesque, making the play a perfect entertainment above all else. Neither Sellars nor the ART actors are shy of sight-gags; in just one extraordinarily droll mime sequence, Stephen Rowe's embarassed Bobchinsky, stranded in front of the curtain with a broken nose, loses his only companion on the stage--a cubic wooden platform that descends as he leans on it--and shuffles nervously, disconsolately offstage...
CONSIDER A Midsummer Night's Dream as a gamut for the stage, a series of isometric exercises for a theater company. In its roughly 2000 lines--far shorter than a Hamlet or a Lear--are scenes of courtly reserve and natural abandon, metaphysical mystery and droll stupidity, gathered up and joined behind the proscenium of Shakespeare's florid verse. Where a play like Troilus and Cressida yokes different forms of theater violently together, Midsummer Night's Dream carefully weaves them in, under, and through each other--thus the shimmering, unsettled brilliance it displays in the hands of a good director...
...Lampoon: the droll organization that brought you the Crimson parody earlier this summer. It was actually one of their best efforts...