Word: floridity
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...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. It's a fine opportunity for a repertory...
...best years, the Catalan promoter, with his mustache wax and lobster telephones and soft watches, his florid metaphorical chitchat and beady eye for the American jugular, finally managed to annihilate his earlier self-Mad Dog Sal, the insecure and ravenously aggressive young lounge lizard whose tiny, enameled visions helped create one of the extreme moments of dandyist revolt and modernist disgust. But today the only interesting thing about Dali is the obsessive grip of his pose. He has convinced a public that could hardly tell a Vermeer from a Velásquez that he is the spiritual heir to both...
Elam Davies, 63. Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. In a time of laid-back preaching, Davies is a successful anachronism: a consummate, self-conscious and often florid dramatist of the pulpit. A transplanted Welshman with volatile eyebrows and a powerful Thespian gift, he is not a large man, but he fills the brooding gothic gloom of the Near North Side church with his resounding voice, as the late Dylan Thomas might if he were reading Yeats, or Richard Burton would if playing Hamlet. Like the poet Thomas, Davies grew up in Swansea, Wales. He claims that Burton patterned his style...
...past camp masters as the '50s Hollywood director Douglas Sirk (Magnificent Obsession) and the '60s Warhol disciple Paul Morrissey (Flesh). But unlike his predecessors, Fassbinder does not recognize the limits of the form. Camp is fine for movies that want to trade exclusively in offbeat humor and florid emotions. In Maria Braun, Fassbinder makes the serious mistake of try ing to convey ideas...
Vocally, Pavarotti in recent years has skillfully negotiated the most treacherous shoals that face a tenor. Early in his career he was a classic tenore lirico, ideally suited to lighter lyric roles like Rodolfo, and florid bel canto roles like Nemorino in L'Elisir d'Amore. With age, however, a tenor's voice takes on a heavier tone and darker coloration. By the time he is in his 40s, a tenore lirico is usually ready for roles in the intermediate spin to (pushed) range, like Cavaradossi in Tosca, and maybe even in the forceful, baritonal tenore drammatico category, like...