Word: outflung
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Star quality" is a term notoriously hard to define. But whatever it is, Julie Andrews, with her outflung smile and crystalline enunciations, still has it. A pity, then, she didn't have richer musical material than the humdrum score by the late Henry Mancini (including songs from the movie such as Le Jazz Hot), with additional numbers by Frank Wildhorn. It's touching, and a little sad, to watch this woman who, nearly 40 years ago, crested to fame in what remains arguably the greatest Broadway musical, My Fair Lady, now throwing herself into songs that have no afterlife; their...
...Jane Wagner, who also collaborated with Tomlin on three Grammy-nominated record albums, four Emmy-honored TV specials and the film The Incredible Shrinking Woman. Wagner has developed a shrewd ear for Tomlin's inflections and an uncluttered directing style that takes full advantage of the star's arms- outflung exuberance and her adroitness at shifting from character to character, place to place, reality to fantasy and back. Here Tomlin plays a baker's dozen of ill-assorted characters, from an uncommonly well-read bag lady to a neurotically self-dramatizing and spiteful 15-year-old. The gallery includes...
...gesture, assuming form in a challengingly haphazard way. De Kooning's sculptures admittedly look regressive. They evoke memories of the European Expressionism of the 1950s-Dubuffet's turnip men and the familiar postwar imagery of the human figure as disaster area. Thus Figure XII, 1970, lying with outflung arms on a bronze-cast roof tile, obscurely suggests the traditional image of crucifixion even though it could just as easily be a sunbather. De Kooning's new work is a matter of symptom, rather than code; its contortions carry less meaning than one is apt to suppose...
...stony prude or a bloodless geometrist. He reveled in depicting bacchanalia where swarthy satyrs lurched after alabaster-skinned nymphs, and chubby putti chugged wine as if it were rosy Pablum -all composed as carefully as a ballet. In his Rape of the Sabine Women (see opposite page), swords and outflung arms set up triangles that play a counterpoint against the squarish architecture. Nothing is left to chance, not even the suggestive but studied pas de deux of the Sabine maidens and their Roman abductors...
...chansons are about ordinary people who come to sad ends rather than bad ends. In Un Carbon Dansait, a slum-bred youngster dreams of being another Fred Astaire; Montand manages a brilliant satiric evocation of second-rate Astaire-the outflung white-gloved hands (without the gloves), the staccato rhythms tapped out on a walking stick like a hollow third leg, and the agitated centipede footwork interrupted with dazzling toothpasty smiles. The funniest number casts Montand as a feverish symphony conductor who snaps his baton, his Beethoven concert and his career in two to waltz off with a girl who cares...