Word: garlanding
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...HEART OF the show, as everyone knows, is the glorious era of RKO and MGM musicals. Ray Bolger does the boasting for all the luminaries present: Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Cyd Charisse, Eleanor Powell, Donald O'Connor, Judy Garland. Among the MGM treats is Gene Kelly's original dance with Carol Haney, whose figure was later replaced by a cartoon figure for the animated classic Invitation to Dance. Kelly dances with garbage-can lids on his feet in It's Always Fair Weather and Donald O'Connor helps him make a shambles of a linguist's office...
...hands, their dance is as dramatic as any dialogue; their movement as eloquent as any speech. Something more than style and footwork fills the scene. No doubt, years hence, we will look back at the 80's and see dancers worthy to stand with Astaire, Kelly, and Judy Garland. With luck, they will not all be ballerinas and Russian immigrants...
...frames are most often found around the work of newer artists, the ones most likely to resist received tradition (and to follow fashion). A deliberately cartoonish image by Kenny Scharf sports edges decked with plastic dinosaurs and rockets. Larger-than-life wooden silhouettes - two birds, for instance, or a garland of branches - shoot up around the landscapes of Alan Herman. More established figures are also working in the same vein. Howard Hodgkin, whose canny strokes of pigment hint at enclosed views, sweeps paint across the frame to twit its pretensions as the final proscenium...
Luminous earlier this year in Serenading Louie and Other Places, Wiest is still no sexpot, no Marilyn; truth to tell, Langella is prettier than she is. More over, she affects a wispy giggle that mimics Monroe and every little girl lost from Susan Alexander Kane to Judy Garland. Yet Wiest has managed to bleach the intelligence out of her face, leaving only a cunning child with the look of a battered seraph. This is no flesh-and-blood performance; it is pure, chilling marrow. Emotional striptease is what such acting is all about. But perhaps not play writing...
...text, Malkovich has shown some up-front ingenuity: spotlighting or freeze-framing a conversation, orchestrating the Ivesian symphony of invective, offering instant replays of the climactic murder. But chaos still reigns. It is as if the frat brothers from Animal House, instead of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, decided to put the show on right here...