Word: mock
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...matched valor as he bests the Volscians, sometimes in singlehanded combat. The man of flinty aristocratic pride storms into view when he is honored with the rank of Roman consul, only to be banished when he reviles the tribunes of the commoners instead of currying their favor with mock humility and an ostentatious public display of his battle scars. When he turns against Rome and joins its enemies in a temper tantrum of crazed revenge, he is a scalded boy bent on killing the dearest thing he loves...
...superb cast lends Taken in Marriage a trace of conviction. There is an aching honesty to Quinlan's Annie as she tries to hold a mirror up to her troubled heart. Streep's alabaster features can convey icy disdain and mock merriment. Her voice is a bed of nails on which she some times lies in self-contempt. As Ruth, Dewhurst was a Rock of Gibraltar. Marchand is better suited to the role, a homebody with artistic impulses who needs a hus band for ballast. Though she has her cranky moments, Wilson's Aunt Helen...
...music. In the famous trio "So muss allein ich bleiben" ("I must remain alone, then"), Rosalinda--whom Gretchen Johnson plays with vocal agility but no sense of style--begins lamenting her parting with husband Einstein. But she, Eisenstein, and Alfred the mad Italian tenor keep breaking out of the mock tragic music into a perky little waltz, as if to tip the audience off that nothing happening on the stage is terribly important...
...Misbehavin' attempts to recreate the atmosphere of a jumping night-spot--perhaps the Cotton Club--in the Harlem of the 1930s. The performers belt out the songs, pushing each other out of the spotlight or fighting over dance partners in mock rivalry. If the mood strikes, they'll spring to their feet to tap out a furious rhythm or languidly drapes themselves across the piano--or the piano-player--onstage. He frequently joins in; sometimes the audience is invited to join...
There is the expected quota of mock anthropology and imaginary biology; the most eccentric and striking example of that genre being a pair of crude effigies of horses, made from sticks, chicken wire and mud by the California artist Deborah Butterfield. There is also a hilarious piece of funkiness by a Texas sculptor, James Surls, representing a tornado chewing through the roof of a church; Surls' debt to that master of buckeye surrealism, H.C. Westermann, is ob vious enough, but the image has a wobbly comic-strip blatancy about it that carries conviction...