Word: gilbertian
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...always gratifying to witness a performer improve his role, and this production affords that gratification in triplicate to staunch Harvard Dilbert and Sullivan patrons. John McKean seems to have found, in Ralph Rackstraw, the Gilbertian lead to which he is best suited. The part calls for rapid changes of character: from a caricature of soulfulness to impetuosity to prideful rage to rapture to despair to pompous authority and back, finally, to rapture. That McKean can make so many transitions so rapidly is itself a feat worthy of praise; that he makes them so smoothly and so convincingly is simply amazing...
...most excellently bloated and insufferable Tolloller. He has managed, somehow, to blend the most absurd elements of Oscar Wilde, Charles Laughton and Peter Ustinov into one vast horror of inane snobbery and scented incompetence. Only Mr. Abbott's Tolloller could have successfully produced, as he did, the quintessential Gilbertian line: "We were boys together;--at least...
Like the show itself, William Jacobson started a bit slowly, as the major general, but by the end of his famous patter song he was the very model of a modern etcetera. He coped with Gilbertian poly-syllables without slowing or slurring, and his voice was adequate. Jacobson moves well, with a good command of the stylized posturing required of Savoyards, and does a delightful bed-time ballet...
...easier to write than prose. On the other hand, Gilbert was a master of his own peculiar medium, and between the gaps there is some pretty good stuff and not a little absolutely splendid stuff. His exposition of his own personal form of social Darwinism, for instance, is typically Gilbertian, which is one of the finest possible ways for a song lyric...
...like cold water from the mouth of a fountain gargoyle-flows a stream of cold wisdom. Anouilh uses the coarse, truthful exaggerations of caricature deliberately to offset the genteel evasions of life painted in watercolor. The general's foundling son may just be the latest in a long Gilbertian line; but the Jostling father, the middle-aged satyr with his subaltern dreams, who finds it harder to grow older because he has never really grown up, is part of a sharper comic vision. The figure of the general suggests that there would be much less war between...