Word: pompousity
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Television has made campaign humor essential, since snappy one-liners help win precious time on the evening news. "Humor works," says Columnist Mark Shields, who sometimes gives jokes to Democrats. "It says, 'I'm not pompous. I'm not pretentious...
Such an account in other hands might be a pompous progression of rave reviews, gently tinted by hindsight. Not here; Houseman has an adequate ego, but he is caustic and funny, a wry observer of theatrical furies and hysterias, including his own. He admits, stout fellow, to taking on the direction of a hopeless Jane Fonda film (The Cool of the Day) simply because it is to be shot on location in Greece and he wants a vacation...
...rank and value, between nobility in title and nobility of the soul. Helena (Harriet Walter), a physician's daughter living in the care of the Countess of Rossillion (Margaret Tyzack), is desperately in love with the Countess's son Bertram (Philip Franks); but Bertram, influenced by the pompous Captain Parolles (Stephen Moore), refuses to love a woman of low station, especially when forced into marriage with her. Deception and humiliation bring Parolles to his knees and Bertram, ultimately, to his senses...
...cast easily metamorphoses during the two-hour Pinafore production: Trial by Jury's defendant, played by Monnen, becomes Pinafore's handsome young hero, Ralph Rackstraw. Crowley assumes another leadership position as the ship's Captain Corcoran, and a newcomer to the evening's spectacle, Sebastian Knowles, plays the pompous Sir Joseph Porter. All three men, along with Craig Bierko as Dick Deadeye and Jo Milroy as Little Buttercup, give the evening's most superb performances. Crowley successively displays the Captain's frustrations in trying to convince his daughter Josephine (Nancy Fatzick) to marry Sir Joseph. Countering the Captain's well...
...John Byrne about the hopeless nights and dreamless days of young men who grind dyes in the "slab room" of a carpet factory near Glasgow. When first produced in New York, off-Broadway in 1980, the play seemed a programmatic denunciation of the social order, as personified by two pompous functionaries and by a blazered young prig who was passing through the slab room on his foreordained...