Word: familiarization
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...slid into a number he has sobbed to audiences the world over: The Little White Cloud That Cried. To club patrons, it seemed the same old lachrymose wheeze, but to Johnnie the effect was like "the first atom bomb, exploding in pieces everywhere." Singer Ray had abandoned his familiar hearing aid, for the first time in his career was able to hear his own caterwauling at its painfully natural decibel count...
...Shush, Baby." Instead of an ego-massaging entourage of yesmen, the old ham had only his personal valet, Lorenzo Chestnut, by his side. In Chestnut's hands were the familiar Berle off-screen props: a soiled towel for mopping the star, a glass of water, a fistful of Dunhill's Larranaga cigars with big white billing on the cellophane: "SPECIALLY SELECTED FOR MILTON BERLE." Said Lorenzo: "I keep one lit for him when he comes off." As Berle waited glumly for his cue, he scowled at a monitor and frazzled the seven-in. Larranaga. "Shush, baby, shush...
...play's whole Birds Eye view of commuter life is by now so familiar as to need to be either freshly observed or gorgeously exaggerated. In Cloud 7 it gets hardly more than a look and a promise. Cloud 7 is not only not a proper suburban satire or farce; it is not playwriting...
...Vichy France into German-occupied Paris. Within a few months their espionage network, named "Inter-Allied," included some 200 agents who kept up steady radio and courier communication with London, fed British intelligence information about German troop concentrations, barracks, antiaircraft defenses, etc. British agents came to cherish the familiar coded words on the wireless: "To Room 55a, War Office, London: The Cat reports...
Callas' own performance had the familiar virtues and faults: warmth and purity in the lower and middle registers, edginess and wobble in the upper ones. But she infused the character of Violetta with ardency, hectic gaiety and a dampened passion that flickered through the role like a wayward fever. Her deathbed agonies had the quiet poignancy and the ring of truth that so often evade lesser artists. All in all, Callas gave the Met its most exciting Traviata in years, and demonstrated again that she has lost none of the turbulent appeal that can magnetize an audience...