Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Originally a record released by Nilsson in 1971. The Point was televised twice as an animated cartoon based on the book of drawings that accompanied the album. The same year, director Jauchem got the idea of adapting it for the stage. That the basic plot structure--the adventures of a boy and his dog--isn't exactly new, might not matter if the details of this particular--version weren't equally old hat. Ostracized by a "lot of little pointy-headed people," for non-conformity (having a round, rather than a pointed, head), the boy Oblio (David Morse) is unjustly...
...about Put Up Your Dukes--and it's enough to make it consistently funny in defiance of 127 years of Pudding tradition--is Mark O'Donnell's script. O'Donnell wrote last year's script, too, but this year he's carried his major innovation, the introduction of a plot, a step further. This year's plot, which is something like the Fractured Fairy Tales that used to separate Rocky from Bullwinkle, is moderately interesting. It holds everything together, too, which is just as well: the show's strength lies less in individual moments (some people admire the big bondage...
What keeps this book from being more than an interesting and sometimes affecting experiment is Updike's unwillingness to cut himself off from the conventions of realism. The half-hearted word games, the tired ecclesiastical jokes, the shallow plot, are all consistent with a vision of Marshfield as a frustrated author given his big chance, but they are unnecessary. Marshfield's anomalous faith gives him a depth, and a dignity, that makes the rest extraneous and distracting. The mediocre sermon early in the month is realistically valid, but artistically wrong. As something written to a preacher in a desert motel...
...LILY" DOESN'T have the same kind of verbal or poetic content Dylan's earlier lyrical marathons did. It uses short words to tell a story of jealousy, revenge, robbery and murder in the Old West. But it only tells us so much; most of the "plot" is missing or only present obliquely. We never find out who the Jack of Hearts is, or what happens to him when it's all over. You feel the song could be twenty times as long: there's room for that much more detail. What Dylan has included is just a slice...
...Hamlet and Paradise Lost count on only as much knowledge of these works as the casual reader of Bartlett's could be expected to have. The move to Agassiz has made LaZebnik's theater less intimate, more like musical comedy. In Teeth he paid little serious attention to plot and wrote a bizarre kind of free association opens buits, MAM the must hardly accompanies the dialogues in all. Occasionally the first violin gets to put in a comment but the rest are silent...