Word: garish
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David R. Gammons' garish set matches the play's bleak tone. Covered in graffitti and enhanced by slide-projected insults and blurry photos, it is lurid and angry. The lighting, too, adds atmosphere--sometimes intimate, sometimes glaringly bright...
Although the tone of A Violent Act is terse and dispassionate, it contains the elements of classic tragedy: terror, vengeance, catharsis. After the garish denouement, reports the author, there was even a dramatic letdown. As one of the Wright City folk stated, "It was like there wasn't nothing ; important to do anymore." She was wrong. One significant task remained -- giving dimension to people and events -- and Wilkinson has seen...
...Gbadolite, Mobutu lives in a series of garish palaces guarded by soldiers drawn from his own Bangala tribe. An early riser, he often tunes in newscasts via satellites. It was after watching the televised execution of his old friend President Nicolae Ceaucescu of Romania, for example, that he decided to embark Zaire on its now stalled "transition to democracy." After breakfast he accords audiences that can stretch into the afternoon; then he relaxes with % his family or studies biographies of men he admires, including Napoleon and De Gaulle. Mobutu is fascinated by Machiavelli, whose treatise The Prince he used...
...productions of hardcore Elizabethan shlock tend to degenerate into a protracted joke at the expense of the crude plot. But Skin and Bone avoids this temptation. Rather than 100 minutes of dreary self-parody, the production flings itself into the play with gay abandon. Of course it still appears garish, over-the-top, even absurd; but it is not cast as simply worthless. The distinction may seem subtle, but it makes the difference between a snide exercise in self-congratulation and a vigorous rendition of a difficult, dated play...
Swoon, another fable of a vicious, failed crime, renounces the garish naturalism of Reservoir Dogs. Swoon is artifice aspiring to art. So was the 1924 atrocity it portrays. When Nathan Leopold (Craig Chester) and Richard Loeb (Daniel Schlachet), two rich young homosexuals, murdered the child Bobby Franks, they were creating a portrait of themselves: powerful elitists, unsullied by the vulgarity of conscience. Director Kalin -- a comer -- is smart enough not to explain the murderers. Instead, in a chiaroscuro cinema style that suggests morgue photos taken by Cecil Beaton, he presents the pair as stars of their own camp pageant...