Word: pacino
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...worst, Pacino has let himself degenerate into the mere sum of his quirks -- short stature emphasized by a rolling, shambling gait, gargling intonations, facial tics, a veritable thesaurus of hand gestures. At his best, as he is in a daring pair of roles now on Broadway, he recaptures with easy artlessness the range and power of his debut. One night he is a lisping, languorous biblical potentate, concealing deadly willfullness within a Bette Davis-like camp distraction, as King Herod in Oscar Wilde's Salome. The next night, in the new Chinese Coffee by the relatively unknown Ira Lewis, Pacino...
...intensely erotic, authentically nude. The beheading of John the Baptist at Salome's behest, after he has thwarted her lust, is sickening yet hypnotic -- and is based on biblical-era chronicles. The pervasive homosexual passion is faithful not only to Wilde but to the culture he portrays. Pacino presides with calculated distraction and studied effeminacy that drop away, as he betrays the wayward Salome, to reveal the steely cruelty of a conqueror...
...disappointed that cynicism is the only thing left to trust. They squabble over money and women, but the big blowup is over a moral failing shared with almost every fictive writer: he has "stolen" his own % life, and that of his unknowing and unwilling friend, to transmute into art. Pacino radiates the desperation of a man whose last possession, his faith in his talent, is also his most fragile...
This has been a year of dozens of star names on Broadway. Pacino tops them all with a reminder of what he could have been -- and may yet become...
THEATER Al Pacino out-Herods Herod -- and then some...