Word: fluff
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...Opera as a Keystone Kops film is from Little Caesar. Both plays recount the daring misdeeds and romantic entanglements of a gangster, but Threepenny Opera's sordid outlaws become Happy End's petty, bumbling bullies. Despite a denunciation of capitalism tacked on at the end, Happy End is insubstantial fluff, a romantic comedy expertly staged and acted by the American Repertory Theatre Company...
...from every page, from a bibliography that numbers over 600 items. The psychobabble, the careless juxtaposition of men and events seem out of place, slapped on in a revision ordered by some editor searching for a hook to brandish in publisher's blurbs. Though sometimes obscured by the fluff, Alitto's tale of one man does emerge in the end. It is a tale worth telling, and as Alitto illuminates how Liang faced universal problems, he does, almost in spite of himself, uncover the universal import of the life of Liang Shu-ming...
When West Side Story opened on Broadway almost 23 years ago, it was greeted as a revolutionary show. Its subject, New York street gangs, was far more adventurous than the typical fluff of musicals; its language was tough and its ending downbeat. This month, when West Side returned in a hit revival, audiences and critics were not so much shocked as charmed; the show's story, language and sociological concerns now belong to a distant, tamer era. Yet one aspect of the production looks as daring today as it did in 1957: Jerome Robbins' choreography. When the rival...
More surprising still, considering that it will be shown opposite such fluff as Charlies Angels, is the harrowing portrayal of life and death in the trenches. CBS deserves praise for showing it, particularly during a sweeps week, and it seems almost harsh to add that the result, though often good, does not measure up to that primitive Lew Ayres talkie of nearly half a century...
...costar, Ann Miller. When haven't we missed her long, lithesome legs? The years have left them far sounder than most currencies. Her taps are tops, routines done with effortless style and sophisticated rhythms. Do we miss burlesque, which forms the substance of Sugar Babies (if sheer fluff has substance)? Not so much, admittedly, for its cornball bag of tricks as for its relaxed mental climate, its absolution from thought. We relish its tipsy humors, its panting satyrs and bird-brained nymphs, who pursue each other with a strangely pagan innocence...