Word: mawkishness
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...Democratic National Convention to visit Atlantic City? Answer: the Christian Booksellers Association convention, biggest of the religious-publishing trade shows. While Ruth Carter Stapleton, Cornelia Wallace and other best-selling authors last week met the people who sell their books, moneychangers in some of the 263 booths were offering mawkish, illuminated paintings of Jesus, T shirts that proclaim HE IS RISEN, PRAISE THE LORD paper napkins and LAST JUDGMENT AT HAND bumper stickers. At convention concerts, Gospel crooners sang and spoke of their conversion from...
...play lasted less than three weeks before local critics turned off the lights. "Dreadful," snipped the Boston Globe of Williams' first drama since Outcry in 1973, "a flickering shadow of his former self." The Boston Herald American said the play "teeters and totters eerily between true tragedy and mawkish melodrama." Complaining that "one of the great talents of all time has been treated like an assembly-line butcher," the newly unemployed Quinn snapped: "Just say that I am more proud of being in a failure by Tennessee Williams than in a hit by a shit...
...that of the audition, the Spanish Inquisition of the theater. Unseen, speaking with the muffled voice of Kafka's God, the casting director asks each of the potential finalists for an accounting of his life and his love for dance and the theater. These accounts are just as mawkish, banal, self-absorbed and dream-bent as would be those of any of the playgoers. They are redeemed by humor and honesty...
Predictably, the sword sunders Charlie's pacifist haven. His youngest son is kidnaped by the Yankees; his eldest is murdered by the Confederates under the misconception that he is a Union soldier. Family scenes bordering on the mawkish abound, culminating in a sob-happy ending. Cullum holds the rambling show together with a strong stage presence and a robust baritone, but his general manner is a trifle too Broadway-slick for a hornyhanded farmer. Producers invariably say of a musical like this that it will find its audience, and much of Shenandoah is so amiably wholesome that one wishes...
...sort of parliamentary setback?no great dislocation. If some expected a bitter, angry valedictory, Nixon was controlled and ultimately conciliatory. Nixon once said that the test of a people is the way it handles the transition of power, and last week?in his resignation speech if not in his mawkish, self-pitying White House goodbye?he deserved credit at least for helping to bring off the transition with dignity in what must have been the most painful moment of his life...