Word: plot
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...same Shinto ritual might have been helpful at the Kennedy Center in Washington, where tryouts began in August. At that point the show ran almost 3 1/2 hours. Its plot was virtually impenetrable, in part because 85% was sung rather than spoken, in part because in its conspiratorial milieu -- the warrior era of 17th century Japan -- good guys quite often turned into clandestine bad guys, or vice versa. Critics were harsh, but audiences were more forgiving. Thanks to word of mouth, the show averaged nearly $400,000 a week at the box office -- almost, but not quite, enough to cover...
...import musicals with the romantic story line and charming set pieces of Broadway tradition. It will have passionate enthusiasts for its bold theatricality and epic sweep; it comes with a built- in constituency. But it may make few new converts. Unless one knows the book or TV show, the plot is hard to get involved in, especially in the breakneck opening minutes. The love scenes, although competently acted, are so flatly written that they lack emotional intensity, a defect that the lush, quasi-operatic score only partly makes up for. In the script's soap-opera view of life, sexual...
...second novel (16th, counting those in the Rockland dump) called The Digger's Game. If somebody isn't teaching this small marvel in writing classes, then U.S. education is in worse shape than we have been told. Probably not, though; there is an indictable villainy or two in the plot, and Higgins is pigeonholed, wrongly but irretrievably, as a crime novelist...
...dialogue -- though with diminishing patience, as if having an uncanny ear and using it were a bit too easy. This drives the author a little crazy when he thinks about it, and he thumps down a precept that could be carved in stone: "Dialogue is character is plot." In a shrewd book published last June, On Writing, he approvingly notes that John O'Hara, a novelist he admires above almost all others, would tell a whole chapter with dialogue -- a husband and wife, for instance, punching with their words, counterpunching, drawing blood. Similarly, novelist Higgins will let a conversation...
...pass up, and you can hardly blame a generation of black civic leaders for succumbing. New York City Mayor David Dinkins and Democratic national chairman Ron Brown are among many who have made or enhanced their fortunes by lending minority luster to broadcast deals. You almost suspect a Republican plot here, since the G.O.P. -- rhetorically the scourge of reverse-discrimination policies -- has never made an issue of this one. The Republican-dominated FCC and Supreme Court have both endorsed...