Word: fey
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Katselas also surrounds his principals with accomplished performers Cullum, who won Tony Awards for Shenandoah and On the Twentieth Century, blends naivete with an almost treacly love for Amanda to create a character who seems unbeatable despite his efforts to the contrary. With a breathless voice, and a fey, almost stupid demeanor. Walker's Sybil seems both attractive and repellent. Much of Private Lives' fun results from watching Sybil evolve as the play unfolds. Walker's confidence--and gestures that skirt the melodramatic but manage to remain realistic firmly anchor her character, if only in space. But as good...
...production focuses on the very characters modern readers of Nicholas Nickleby find to be pasteboard cliches of middle-class sentimentality: noble Nicholas, snow-white Kate, wounded faun Smike?and makes their stodgy virtues real and comprehensible. It renounces the fey modernism of camp; it takes a stand, grows tall in its righteousness, infuses the audience with its passion, brings Dickens back to life not as a carver of curios but as a man who, in George Orwell's phrase, "is generously angry...
...girl-children [are] nymphets," wrote Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita. Few indeed have the "fey grace... the slenderness of a downy limb" and other nascent charms so dear to a Humbert Humbert. Edward Albee, who is staging a drama based on the novel, chose Blanche Baker over hundreds of preteens to play eleven-year-old Lo to Donald Sutherland's fortyish Humbert. Blanche is 24, but well qualified. She was virtually born for the role: her mother, Carroll Baker, won stardom 24 years ago as the sensuous heroine of Baby Doll. As for Blanche's advanced age, she says...
There are many aspects of Cornell's imagery which seem fey, precious or backward-looking: the Christmas frosting, bats and moss and dingly dells. There is a treacherous line between sentiment and sentimentality, particularly in his evocations of his own childhood. Yet time and again, even his most gothic fantasies and his most fussily reverential evocations of dead ballerinas are plucked back from the edge by Cornell's rigor as a formal artist. The essence of the box is to contain, and within a rectangular grid, at that. Cornell enhanced this with a spare, strict sense of proportion...
...presents with marvelous subtlety. They do not look like the finished product, but neither are they like raw footage: they have the half-polished air of a rough cut. Above all, there is Peter O'Toole, doing his John Huston imitation, but putting a lacy edging of the fey around it. Daring and hilarious, he perfectly sets the tone of this antic, artfully paced piece...