Word: pointilliste
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...birth of pointillist painting. Commodore Perry's opening of Japan to the West. A murderous barber and his woman companion who cooks the victims in pies. A bitter show-biz story of financial rise and moral fall--told chronologically backwards. The ruin of marriages. The disappointments of infidelity. The decline of the chorus-girl kick line as a metaphor for the loss of American innocence...
...Astaire could get a thrill just from being caught in the rain with Ginger Rogers. Gene Kelly shouted, "Gotta dance!" as if it were a battle cry or a mating call. But those carefree days seem as distant as Ike and Mamie; musicals have more serious topics--Argentine dictators, pointillist painters--weighing on their souls. Musicals used to be called, oh, High Spirits. Now London's hot song-and-dance show is Les Miserables, which locals translate as The Glums. That is precisely the disease afflicting the modern musical. Artistic ambition and a social conscience are all very fine...
...Milbank's Couture fills a real need. Very little of substance has been written about couturiers. Most of the best commentary on their work is squirreled away in novels: Proust's chronicling of the shift from Belle Epoque bustles to the more natural silhouette, Fitzgerald's and Waugh's pointillist evocations of '30s glamour, Mary McCarthy's accurate, often satiric eye for all feminine strategies...
...pans, he oversees a staff of 18. Among them, they turn out pasta and homemade breads twice a day, as well as thin, crackling raspberry and orange tarts. Sooner or later all try their hand at the subtle and restrained garnishes created by Robuchon. He tends to favor a pointillist shimmer of color, sometimes achieved with tiny droplets of tomato sauce dotted from a knife point to rim a sauce of grass-green pureed spinach or by flecks of herbs and vegetables added to a terrine of rabbit set in a pale, jewel-like aspic. Wielding a tiny round cutter...
...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 verse and chorus; it soars toward traditional musical passion only at midpoint, then withdraws into tart anticlimax. It takes a second or third hearing for ballads like Finishing the Hat, Beautiful and Sunday to betray subterranean seisms...