Word: elfin
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Updike's elfin revenge includes a six-page bibliography of Bech's works as well as criticism of them. Travel Light, Bech's highly praised first novel, seems to carry strains of Kerouac's On the Road and Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. Brother Pig, a novella, hints ever so slightly of Mailer's stylishly oblique and politically muddled Barbary Shore ("Puzzling Porky" is Updike's title for the TIME review). When the Saints, a collection of essays and sketches of the kind that often get published from the sheer momentum...
...utility of railroad tracks carrying the playgoer from station to station of the plot. The chorus numbers, staged by Director-Choreographer Ron Field, belong to the squirrel theory of dance. Everyone scampers, scampers, scampers, but with so much joie de vivre that animation almost qualifies as design. A perky, elfin-like charmer named Bonnie Franklin lends spirited vitality to the song-and-dance title number and is rightly rewarded with a storm of applause...
...Elfin and Chinese. The Mozart was assigned to Peter Ustinov. Directing a full-length opera for the first time, he tackled The Magic Flute with warnings ringing in his ears. "Some pointed out that it was the most difficult opera of all to stage," said Ustinov. Their point was well taken, since The Magic Flute is a stylistic hodgepodge: there are dazzling coloratura arias, sunny folk songs and slapstick scenes. It is a curious melange, and the fact that it is based on a solemn Masonic morality play only adds to the confusion...
Ustinov succeeded where others had failed by playing the opera, as he put it, for "what's on the surface." It turned out to be a poetic, elfin romp, somewhat in the spirit of Beni Montresor's enchanting 1966 production for the New York City Opera. Said Ustinov: "Too many directors try to make another Parsifal out of The Magic Flute...
...there is nothing unbelievable about the rest of the picture or the performance of its star. Geneviève Bujold, who first caught the eye of moviegoers with a bit part in Alain Resnais's La Guerre Est Finie (TIME, Feb. 3, 1967), has the kind of fragile, elfin charm and doe-eyed allure that wins without wanting to. The name is pronounced Jahn-vee-jev Boo-johld. It is a name to remember...