Word: frumped
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Jamestown, N.Y., electrician, Ball left home at 15 to study acting in New York City. Although she started as a model and chorus-line beauty, she never lost touch with the insecure, self-conscious adolescent inside her and seemed most at ease when playing a zany or a frump. Her great creation was the Lucy character, a Little Scamp who was forever conniving, forever failing, forever meriting punishment yet winning forgiveness. The thwarted schemer was a figure dating back to the Romans if not the Greeks, but Ball deftly sentimentalized the character, merged its cunning intellect with joyously low physical...
Page's tics, fidgets and exaggerated nasalities, which have overdecorated many a characterization, here serve to heighten a shrewdly earthbound interpretation. Her Arcati is not dotty or otherworldly. She is a coarse, calculating businesswoman, a vulgar social climber, a tiresome, self-absorbed frump who just happens to be a medium with the gift of raising the dead. Her manner is so much the grasping fraud that the audience is stunned when she delivers the goods. Indeed, she is stunned herself: there are few funnier sights than Page striding across the stage in pursuit of a ghost whose presence she senses...
...otherwise wonderful "High Flying Adored" includes this unusual rhyme; "I'm their savior. That's a what they call me/ So Lauren Bacall me." Fortunately, though, the last lyrics are overshadowed by stage action as Evita rushes back and forth, gradually transforming herself from a slip-clad frump to a Dior stunner...
...cloyingly--there are times when you want to rough him up a little for being too smarmy, and not nearly charming enough--but still manages a strong performance. And honors for a show-stopping effort go to Jim O'Brien, who brings to the part of Bud Frump--the boss's maddeningly wimpish nephew--not only an impressive comic flair, but also the best singing voice in the cast. O'Brien's clear, powerful solos in "Coffee Break" and "Gotta Stop That Man," the two best-staged production numbers, do full justice to Loesser's music...
...year-old frump having an embarrassing amount of trouble hanging on to her husband, played by Henry Fonda. What to do? Why, radical plastic surgery, of course, from head to toe. Even after all that, however, Hank will still have none of her. That's the story line for Ash Wednesday, just filmed in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy. A bit sad but not very credible, since the wife is played by Elizabeth Taylor, who looks lovelier than ever as she emerges from her bandages...