Word: impishness
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WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE OF Virgil Thomson's impish opera Four Saints in Three Acts? Composed to a nonsense text by Gertrude Stein, originally sung by a mostly amateur all-black cast and set against a 15,000-sq.-ft. cyclorama backdrop made of cellophane, the work was a sensation at its Hartford, Connecticut, premiere in February 1934 and quickly moved to Broadway for a six-week run. Ever since, music lovers have been debating what, if anything, it means. "Pigeons, on the grass alas," indeed...
...writer too in the dark vitality of the newspaper scenes, the habit of looking down on men in high places, the name of young Herman's bicycle: Rosebud. The two men privately insisted it was Hearst's pet name for Marion's sex. But that could be an impish trick, just as the whole Rosebud plot is--since, on the evidence of the film, no one heard Kane's dying word, so no one could search for its meaning...
Political arguments aside, this had to be called Pocahontas. It is not the story of John Smith and his Indian girlfriend; it is the portrait of a princess of the spirit. Instead of reducing the historical character to a cardboard placard of goodness, the film gives her an impish curiosity and willfulness. Because she also has a classical heroine's sense of quest, the picture's Pocahontas rises above stodgy old legend into the sky of myth; and there she soars, eagle-like, watching over the land and its contentious people. That's apt for a role model...
...Geraldine O'Rawe) is just the thing. On the very first day, she meets Jack Foley (Chris O'Donnell), who enters with a caress from the camera that practically screams "love interest." Sure enough, Jack falls for Benny, preferring her to the beautiful but cold Nan and the charming, impish Eve. Benny's own characteristic--in this movie, nobody has more than one--is her winning levelheadedness; as Jack tells her, "You are solid, aren...
Each session took on its own character, Moloney says, "like chapters in a book." The Rolling Stones, who did The Rocky Road to Dublin, a roistering waltz with an impish touch of Satisfaction thrown in, showed up with their own bar. Moloney's tight charts soon surrendered to jam-session chaos. At gig's end, the genial mob adjourned to a pub and quaffed Guinness until 6 in the morning...