Word: modern
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Scrupulously following the action of Shakespeare's play, The Skinhead Hamlet nonetheless observes the aesthetic standards of its modern setting. Going far beyond the Bard's request for "brevity," playwright Richard Curtis has provided the most laconic dialogue in memory. Hamlet's famous--and, in a bad production, interminable--soliloquy is reduced here to eight words. In the economical vocabulary of Curtis' leather-clad characters, a particular unprintable word suggesting the sexual act makes up half the dialogue, to hilarious result...
This game known as football eventually spawned something called professional football. But it also spawned something much more heinous: modern college football. This game resembles professional football in most respects, but bears two distinct differences. First, in modern college football, you can attempt a two-point conversion after a touchdown, while in the pros, only a one-point try is allowed. Second, in professional football the players are paid directly, via salaries; in modern college football, the players are paid indirectly, via salaries, sinecures, and sneakers...
...Toscanini had conducted more modern works, more American works, Horowitz suggests, then perhaps classical music would not be as ossified as it is today, with young performers playing the same, standard works dating from earlier centuries. Toscanini, for Horowitz, was more than just a product of his times. He was also a formative influence on the American musical scene of his time and ours...
...justice in his work to the themes that informed his 16 years with Halliwell: love vs. jealousy, career vs. home life, husband vs. wife, son vs. mother. As it was, he wrote three full-length plays (Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Loot, What the Butler Saw) that subverted old genres and modern society with a cheekily amoral wit. Now Alan Bennett has dramatized Orton's life in Prick Up Your Ears, based on John Lahr's nifty biography. Both works take their title from a farce Orton planned to write. The title...
Frankenstein was a modern horror story; Russell means Gothic to be the last horror show. Byron is Count Dracula, feeding on his guests' dreams and demons. Shelley is every weak hero, Polidori every mad doctor, Clairmont every wench whose lust turns her into a succubus. And Godwin, racked by visions of her stillborn child, becomes the cursed mothers of The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby. From the labor of her nightmares, she gives birth to literature's most enduring monster...