Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Although gales of laughter greeted the Boston Stock Company's presentation of "The Whole Town's Talking" at the St. James Theatre on Monday night, I in my humble nothingness failed to be swept along on the boisterous tide. Now I am not blase nor have I anything against the management. On the contrary it seems only proper to say that if you go, you may possibly enjoy yourself thoroughly. If, however, you remember Grant Mitchell in the same production you will feel just as lonely as I did on Monday night. There was something lacking...
...first place, unlike most farces, clever lines are notable because of their absence. Now this is as it should be, since there are enough clever situations in the play to sink any ship in spasms of laughter. Situations, however, require extremely clever acting, which mean that they don't require over-acting. Except in two or three cases over-acting was the fly in the ointment of the St. James Company. Had the various parts been played with a little more subtlety and finesse, had there been less self-conscious attempts at loud-mouthed humor, the play would have been...
...distribution of pamphlets, constituting inter alia, the crime of lèse-majesté*. The author was then summoned to appear within 15 days before a military judge in Madrid, to give testimony in his defense. Somewhere in France, somebody informed Ibanez of the summons. Roared he in hearty laughter: "I would just as soon take refuge on a cannibal island or throw myself into waters inhabited by crocodiles or famished sharks as to confide myself to the government of bandits now ruling Spain...
...turned out while a responsible uncle put a match to it-and the fun, the rather terrifying fun, began! The leaping thin flames, blue and yellow like wild pansies, turned the laughing players into a shifting, shrieking, witch's circle ... a whirl of darting hands and skirls of laughter and pain. . . . Where's the dictionary? "Flapdragon-Snapdragon.-A sport in which raisins or grapes are snapped from burning brandy and eaten. See example I " "The wantonness of the thing was to see each other look like a demon as we burnt ourselves and snatched at the fruit. This...
...composers for the piano. In Borodin's Au Couvent, a bell tolls for 18 measures, silvery, gentle, relentless; Debussy composed an intricately sophisticated pattern for bells in his Japanese Temple Gongs; stern bells crash and roll in Tschaikowsky's 1812 Overture; sleigh bells jingle like hard, gay laughter in his Troika (Op. 37, No. 11); bells happily pious tinkle in the Celeste of Korngold's Die Tote Stadt; the profound and icy-hearted Kremlin bell booms in Rachmaninoff's Prelude (Op. 3, No. 2). Many are the other great composers who have written bell-music...