Word: earnestness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...women have the best of the book and the best of the songs, and it is impossible to choose a favorite among the sweetly earnest Callaway, the game and leggy Cox, the knowing but uncynical Fowler. But it is Callaway who has the show's signature song, a first-act finale that somehow summarizes Baby's strengths. Called The Story Goes On, it is, of all things, a hymn to the joys of joining the great chain of being. It could have been bathetic. It could have been pretentious. It could have been desperate. But like much else...
...never abuse the shield by launching an offensive first strike. But, concedes Major General John Storrie, an Air Force space official, "we walk a very narrow line in these matters between strategic defense and offense." The Soviets cannot reasonably be expected to stake their survival on Reagan's earnest assertion that "the United States does not start fights...
...less charitable viewer might crassly term the 1940s Cole Porter opus dated, but in truth the musical is only as old as the cast feels. In fact, the musical's title might well be taken as a caveat to any troupe staging Anything Goes; an earnest cast would be the show's undoing. If the title were not warning enough, Porter offers other none-to-subtle clues. Why else sprinkle the lyrics of the infamous. "It's Delovely" with a plea for the audience to have patience "while I crucify this verse...
...show, however, mostly stays home to tackle other earth-moving topics. Will Mike Doonesbury (Ralph Bruneau), who is presented onstage as a whiny, pigeon-toed virgin reminiscent of Walter Denton on the old Our Miss Brooks TV series, throw away his prepared speech and just propose to the earnest JJ. (Kate Burton)? Will B.D. (Keith Szarabajka), the beyond-macho quarterback, survive being traded from the Dallas Cowboys to Seattle? Will California Hippie Zonker Harris (Albert Macklin) keep his crazed Uncle Duke (Gary Beach) from "turning our commune into a flophouse for dopeheads and burnouts"? These problems, and the question...
...imminence of the Orwellian year have galvanized a small army of professors, critics and writers, journalists, pundits, social scientists, politicians and professional doomsters; hardly anyone paid for thinking out loud seems able to resist the temptation to play with Orwell's numbers. The game began in earnest last January and could, thanks to crowded conditions, easily extend into 1985. The action takes different forms: an apparently endless round of academic seminars and symposiums, coast to coast, from Manhattan College to Stanford; a swelling stream of magazine articles ("On the Brink of 1984") and books (1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism...