Word: mock
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Sellars's updating never interferes with the music. In fact, many of his innovations involve clever exploitation of the Handel score. The bouncy rhythms of Dorinda's first-act aria on the ineffable nature of love--she's the beach bunny, nee shepherdess--become the excuse for an hilarious mock-disco strut. Later in the opera, when Dorinda sings of love's bitterness, it is Sellars's inspiration that she pour herself a stiff drink between repetitions (all Orlando's arias consist of six or eight lines repeated again and again), with the result that her octave leaps slowly become...
...best of the Germans is probably A.R. Penck (born Ralf Winkler), who was on show at the Sonnabend Gallery. An East German emigre to the West, he does mock-archaeological images blown up to "American" size. On a flat ground, flat pictographs: Ariadne holding her thread, Theseus as a stick figure with spear, a Minotaur. This primitivism is meant to suggest a heroic Aegean prehistory, a lost age when sibyls muttered in every cleft, and any scratch or spiral meant something. But Penck's images are mere quotation suffused with graphic charm; they are little more than the husks...
...show opens with a burst of well-directed energy which carries the first few scenes with reasonable crispness. Animation leaps from the opening number, a mock funeral for the tyrannical and bigoted Ol' Cap'n Cotchipee (Christopher Charron); the actors bounce cheerfully through the rather simplistic choreography, though the Old Library stage affords little room for 20 dancers to swing. Things seem fine through the establishment of a few basic plot premises...
...ominous rumble in the east. Slowly, one after another, six B-52 bombers came thundering out of the bright sun, flying only 600 ft. above the desert floor. Just a mile from the audience, each warplane sent 27 Mark-82 bombs, weighing 500 lbs. apiece, crashing onto a mock airstrip. Pillars of fire and black smoke billowed into the translucent sky. Minutes later, the aircraft wheeled to the west, starting their 7,000-mile nonstop flight back...
...each of the four farces. The constant rotation fosters an appreciation for the different inflections of the characterizations, but it also builds a sense of team spirit. Serban drives the point home by bridging the last two farces with a center-stage costume change. Genuinely enjoying themselves, the actors mock the pompous Renaissance trumpet music in the background and banter boisterously about nothing in particular...