Word: horatio
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Connerly's life, a Horatio Alger tale of an orphan's adversity, pluck and triumph, has an almost mythical value to his supporters. He was born in Louisiana, where his parents divorced when he was two (he hasn't seen his father since) and his mother died when he was four, leaving him in the care of her sister and brother-in-law Bertha and James Louis. At six, he moved with them to Bremerton, Wash.--a journey made difficult by segregation laws that shut them out of hotels, rest rooms and diners--and later to Sacramento, where Connerly...
...with school, the little ones and cooking duties, Saskia spends her off hours reading. The imaginary world she creates around herself is rich with the images and characters of her favorite stories--not "fantasy" tales, but ancient epics of sailors, travelers and explorers, from Odysseus and Marco Polo to Horatio Hornblower and that island-bound explorer of the sky, Tycho Brahe. The towering absence of Saskia's barely-remembered father, a Danish sailor named Thomas, fills her imagination with images of captains, the sea and Northern lands; the towering presence of her beautiful and world-wise best friend, Jane Singh...
...Crystal and Robin Williams as the First Gravedigger and Osric, respectively, but the generally strong cast more than makes up for this misjudgment. Claudius (Derek Jacobi) is subtly played, his motivation portrayed not in a devilish light, but more as ambition that has gotten in the way of morality. Horatio, always a difficult role to play, is handled deftly by Nicholas Farrell, who conveys the emotion of his part without over-emphasizing his relationship with Hamlet. Laertes, a role often overlooked in modern productions, is carefully played by Michael Maloney, who shows the dichotomy between being the puppet of Polonius...
Branagh sets the play in a pre-World-War-I era, apparently for no reason other than novelty. As all Hamlet-o-philes know, the story begins with the sighting of King Hamlet's ghost by Horatio (Nicholas Ferrell), Marcellus (Jack Lemmon '47) and Barnardo (Ian McElhinney). Here Bismarck-style hats poised atop the head of an improbably cast Marcellus steal a scene intended to prepare the audience for the play's mood of ranting and revenge. But to the audience's consternation, the period so over-emphasized early on plays a minor or non-existent role later...
Adam Green is the split-personality Capt'n Neato-Man, who switches personae from mama's boy to bully to sexy, self-assured superhero in the three-way tug-of-war over "Horatio." At the heart of the story is the question, "Will Larry agree to give up his identity and become 'Horatio'?" Towards the end, the script dips into banality, pitting Larry against the Cap'n in the worn-out opposition between the "Get a real life" and "Live your dream" schools of thought. Overall, however, great lines ("You can't have sex without love!" "What are you, kidding...