Word: husband
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Tail Feathers from Mother Goose (Little, Brown; $19.95) skims a famous compilation of nursery rhymes by two Oxonians, Iona Opie and her late husband Peter. Their previous books include superior verses, but no better illustrations. Some 60 prominent artists from Sendak to Nicola Bayley have given stature to such street doggerel as "Once there was a little boy,/ He lived in his skin;/ When he pops out,/ You may pop in" and George Bernard Shaw's effort for the young, presented at age 93: "Dumpitydoodledum big bow wow/ Dumpitydoodledum dandy!" Not exactly Dr. Seuss, but, as young people know, many...
COWARD'S plays rely on the lightning speed of witty repartee, which is rapid even for the British stage. Indeed, a quick pace seems to pervade the characters' every action. Elizabeth Humphrey as Mrs. Condomine affects a no-nonsense, secretarial air that perfectly fits, as her husband would say, her "glacial nature." As Humphrey's high strung counterpart, Peter Hirsch also seems to have had one too many cups of Sanka before the performance. This freneticism however, appears to be appropriate to Charles' character...
Indeed, why should it? Holly Cate, in sparkly Jem doll-like attire, is the third player of this astral menage a trois and the menace behind this confusion. As Charles' deceased wife, she does every-thing in her power to win her husband over to the other side. Charles consequently calls Madame Arcati, played by the effervescent Valerie Steiker, upon the scene to exorcise Elvira's spirit from the house...
With her roly-poly figure and truck-driver's tongue, she is hardly your standard-issue TV mom. She works at a plastics factory, berates her good- natured but usually out-of-work husband, and snaps impatiently at her three nattering kids. "Why are you so mean?" complains one tot who doesn't get her way. " 'Cause I hate kids," she replies, "and I'm not your real mom." Her idea of a high time is going out to dinner at a restaurant "that don't have a drive-through." Hearing that two friends have got divorced, she responds with...
...visit to a restaurant or a discussion of how to pay the bills. (Roseanne's strategy: "You pay the ones marked final notice, and you throw the rest away.") Best of all, behind the put-downs and childish taunting lies a genuinely affectionate and affecting (if sometimes cutesy) husband-wife relationship...