Word: phrasings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...razzmatazz here; in fact, no choreography. No heart-pummeling sentiment; in fact, virtually no characters, as Author-Director James Lapine follows Seurat's lead and dehydrates his actors into cardboard stereotypes. Nor is there a surfeit of "humma-mamumma-mamum-mable melodies," Stephen Sondheim's derisively witty phrase from his last show, Merrily We Roll Along. Sondheim long ago renounced such simple show-biz pleasures; neither Dot nor the audience gets to go to the Follies. This score is often doggedly mimetic, achieving its pointillist effects note by Johnny-one-note. Nearly every number begins with a staccato...
Some members of the Spartacus Youth League tend to be avowed Communists. I am an American and a registered Democrat, so this is an unsettling fact. They also tend to write with a lot of exclamation points and use inflammatory phrases. I am an aspiring journalist, so this style of writing seems distasteful. Talking with one as he tried to sell me Young Spatacus, for example, I had to point out that the phrase "white-hooded Ku Klux Klan scum" was too strong a tone to take; it was also redundant...
There are plenty of ballet jokes, but they work for non-fans too. The dancing master who instructs the ugly stepsisters starts his lesson with the opening phrase of Balanchine's Theme and Variations. The girls are played by male dancers (Johan Renvall and Thomas Titone) performing, Tchikaboumskaya-style, on pointe. In the ballroom scene, Renvall even tosses off some free-swinging fouettes, a bow to the legendary Pierina Legnani, who stunned St. Petersburg in 1893 by doing 32 fouettés in Cinderella...
...Virgin's plot is about the balance between promiscuity and monasticism, and between innocence and cynicism. Witness the title: to modern lascivious ears, "wise virgin" sounds like an innocent losing here naivete. But in the "Treatise of Heavenly Love," the pet project of a medievalist named Giles Fox, the phrase refers to the Gospel parable of the wise and foolish virgins. Those who have "kept burning that holy light of virginity in their lamps can present themselves spotless to their Lord and Lover," says the thirteenth-century sermon, but their concupiscent comrades will be damned by their "fleshly lusts...
...linguistic ability and than a very small circle of friends enjoyed his contemptuous altitude toward life. With what predictable withering epigrams he had managed to dismiss those fools who thought the world was worth saving by a change in its political system: With what equally brief violence of phrase he had dealt with the ideas of the God-squad...