Word: laughter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...scenes of 1901. Some of these are of remarkable intensity. Picasso painted Gustave Coquiot, a fashionable Paris art and theater columnist, as a sinister god of urban pleasure, green shadows straining against red lips in a pale mask of a face. Some of the women, their faces blurred by laughter or squinched up into pug masks of greed, seem to predict by ten years the jittery misogyny of German expressionism. Woman in Blue, 1901, with her fierce little Aubrey Beardsley whore's head surmounting the dress of a Velázquez court portrait, is an especially compelling example...
Mark has been remanded to Father Farley for remedial taming, and this results in some of the funniest scenes in a play that, for all its tensions, bubbles with surprising laughter. When Mark seeks to deliver a sermon on the evils of "mink hats, cashmere coats and blue hair" Father Farley shows him how to palliate his anathema "in a Norman Rockwell setting." Perplexed as to how to console parishioners who have lost a dear one, Mark is told by the Father to "bring common grief to the level of the inconsolable by saying something inane," and he proffers some...
Company numbers come off the strongest. The cast of five dance and sing best when all together. Porter's "Too Darn Hot" is the most successful number in the show. The choreography is smooth, the performance fairly polished. The women's trio in "I Can Cook, Too" evoked loud laughter, as did the men's equally amusing rendition of the song in a modern parody of the 1944 Bernstein classic. After Hours could use more of this kind of innovation...
...Cabinet Room, a startlingly different scene was occurring just outside on the South Lawn. Under the springtime splendor of the cherry blossoms, thousands of youngsters were enjoying the traditional Easter Monday egg rolling. The thick, lightly tinted bulletproof windows of the Cabinet Room could not block out the laughter and the sound of music...
Simon slays. His weapon is customarily murderous laughter. It is not quite like that this tune around. The laughs are ample yet muted and subordinated to a story in which a father and a daughter tug at each other's heartstrings. In terms of standard Simon fare, this comedy is almost a poignant tearjerker...