Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...eager smile smack through the back of the camera. Precocious and poised, she proclaimed she was going to be an actress -- a career compromise reached only reluctantly at age five when she accepted that she could not grow up to be a quarter horse. Today she weeps with laughter as she recalls galloping on hands and knees, shouting defiantly to parents, "I'm still going to be a horse even after my breasts...
...places." What Into the Woods does, gloriously, is make the case for what musicals might be, blending innovation and old-fashioned storytelling into an elixir of delight. It makes audiences think of Freud and Jung, of dark psychological thickets and sudden clearings of enlightenment, even as they roar with laughter. Its basic insight, plainly influenced by the revisionist scholarship of Bruno Bettelheim, is that at heart, most fairy tales are about the loving yet embattled relationship between parents and children. Almost everything that goes wrong -- which is to say, almost everything that can -- arises from a failure of parental...
Harvard Coach Bill Cleary was so unaffected by his team's 15-3 drubbing at the hands of the United States Olympic Hockey Team last night at Bright Center that he walked into the visitors' locker room and offered his laughter and congratulations...
...until you laugh this season. A new term has even been coined to describe the hybrid form: dramedies. Three new series -- ABC's Hooperman and The "Slap" Maxwell Story and CBS's Frank's Place -- are ostensibly comedies, but they go for few jokes and have no laughter on the sound track. As for the more traditional sitcoms, they are tackling such heavy subjects as AIDS (Designing Women), Alzheimer's disease (The Golden Girls) and teenage drunk driving (this week's segment of Valerie's Family). On a recent episode of Kate & Allie, a middle-class mother of two (Jane...
...Mixing laughter and tears in one package, of course, is hardly a revolutionary idea. Hollywood movies have been doing it for decades, from Charlie Chaplin through Terms of Endearment. Some of TV's classic family shows, such as Father Knows Best, were as much earnest morality plays as laugh-out-loud comedies, and groundbreaking sitcoms like All in the Family and M*A*S*H demonstrated more than a decade ago that TV comedy is not incompatible with social commentary. Still, genre labels seem especially askew these days. Bruce Willis won this year's Emmy Award for lead actor...