Word: pettish
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Carousel sentimentalizes the redemptive power of parenthood for Billy, a pettish, self-pitying idler and punk whom Hayden plays with an early-Brando sneer. Becoming a father may not make an abusive husband saintly; it often just gives him a new victim to pummel. A compelling actor, Hayden is not enough of a singer -- he loses his way rhythmically and sounds faint in the score's one modernist number, the anthemic Soliloquy ("my boy Bill"), which ends the first act. Sally Murphy is too bland to evoke sympathy as Billy's doormat of a wife...
Michelle Pfeiffer, an Oscar nominee this year for Dangerous Liaisons, makes her stage debut as the grieving countess Olivia. Jeff Goldblum (The Fly) is her pettish steward Malvolio, John Amos (Roots) her drunken uncle Sir Toby Belch and Gregory Hines (The Cotton Club) Toby's companion in ribaldry, the jester Feste. Stephen Collins (Tattinger's) is the duke who desires Olivia, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (The Color of Money) the girl-masquerading-as- a -pageboy sent to plead his case. Among other screen and stage stalwarts rounding out the troupe is Charlaine Woodard (Ain't Misbehavin') as the merrily scheming...
...some fifty years, they still do not know each other completely; the husband reproaches his wife for sleeping at night when he has been restless, and gets the same pettish reprimand in return. But they seem to grow closer and closer, even during their few days in Tokyo, in the face of a new world and the exclusion from the lives of their children. They reach a perfect unity as they side by side gazing out to sea, lonely misfits at a holiday resort, so attuned that even their kimonos match...
...some fifty years, they still do not know each other completely; the husband reproaches his wife for sleeping at night when the has been restless, and gets the same pettish reprimand in return. But they seem to grow closer and closer, even during their few days in Tokyo, in the face of a new world and the exclusion from the lives of their children. They attain a perfect unity as they sit side by side gazing out to sea, lonely misfits at a holiday resort, so attuned that even their kimonos match...
...thrown. No student of women's-magazine prose can fail to understand the symbolic significance of this, and it has nothing to do with horseback riding. The groom (servants are as clever as presidential speechwriters in this sort of fiction) is Fate, and Georgie's pettish assertion of masculinity means that he is in for about 300 pages of fatefulness...