Word: paces
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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UMBERTO ECO scored big in 1983. The English translation of his The Name of the Rose appeared in the United States and was a phenomenal success. A mystery novel set in a 14th century Italian abbey, it entertainingly combined detailed scholarship and philosophic inquiry with the pace and plot of a top-notch potboiler. A book that succeeded on many levels. The Name of the Rose earned itself a rightful place on widely disparate shelves, from the pulp-novel racks at the A & P to the syllabus for Professor David Herlihy's History 31, Medieval Europe...
...then: BANG! Dazzling Diana (Michelle Pfeiffer) splays onto the hood of Ed's Toyota, cries, "Get me out of here!" and leads him into the night. Once the movie wakes up, it never lets up, in pace or plot invention. Seems Diana / has smuggled past Customs six priceless emeralds "from the scepter of an ancient Persian king" and concealed them (we won't say where) for delivery to one of those hotshot sheiks who in the past decade have turned parts of L.A. into a Little Araby. As for ordinary Ed, he will risk death, betrayal and another 24 hours...
Forbidden access to Eliot's papers, and permission to quote extensively from his work, Hastings is like a surgeon forced to operate in a straitjacket. So drudgy Tom sets the play's pace and defeats the efforts of Herrmann to animate this stick--a challenge not usually above him, as he demonstrated two years ago in Plenty, playing another man of propriety married to a disturbed idealist. Covington, Tyzack and Haig (imported from the Royal Court Theater in London, where Tom and Viv was first produced last year) perform admirably in better roles, ones with a little shading, irony...
...first act races out of the gate, with clever lines and snappy, numbers. Lou picks up the pace in his jazu anthem to a reprobate. "Devil Without a Cause" Like the next song. "Ding Dong," which features Mandy Torpedoes and the Pips, the strength of "Devil" lies more in the excellent music and choreography than in any single performance. By the fourth scene, though, the audience is clearly itching to get back to subplot A--Harvard undergrads and alumni of what may be the most anachronistic club on campus dress up, drink up, and go wild. The mini-kickline near...
...pace, moreover, was more leisurely than the traditional pre-med program. For example, a one semester course was spread over 15 weeks, a luxury not possible in the typically crammed medical school curricula. In the end, however, the theoretical content covered in the courses was similar to that covered in many of the traditional medical school programs...