Word: puckish
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...English drama cannot meet. The Miser, by Molière, the Guthne troupe's second offering, almost visibly chased away the lingering ghost of a sad Hamlet. Director Douglas Campbell has made a stylized harlequinade of Molière's comedy of avarice, with curtsying dances and puckish pratfalls, Halloween masks and wopsical hats. It is more a costume ball than a play, and it stresses what is sheen-deep in Molière's wit rather than what is skinflinty. Still, in a glancing way, the master French comic moralist's point does get made...
...slipped silently out of the Plymouth, and walked two blocks to Madison Square Garden. Nobody recognized him staring up at the marquee that read TONIGHT -BOXING-CLAY vs. JONES. Clay eturned to his room, sprawled on the bed. At 10 he was up again, restless, bubbly' puckish. At the weigh-in, Cassius burst into the room and strode toward the scales -startled laughter in his wake. Even Doug Jones could not resist a smile. There, plastered across the Mighty Mouth, was a 2-in.-wide strip of adhesive tape...
...brought into church by fear of war, hope of social prestige, or for other nonreligious reasons. Washington's Methodist Bishop John Wesley Lord charges that "the church recruited people who had been starched and ironed before they were washed." In the nuclear age, suggests San Francisco's puckish Episcopal Bishop James Pike, God became "a sort of tranquilizer pill to a populace keeping a wary eye on the sword of Damocles." Others who joined churches found them not serious enough, or contemptibly unconcerned with corruption and injustice...
Died. Victor Moore, 86, chubby, puckish actor, whose best-remembered role was Alexander Throttlebottom, the quavering-voiced ineffectual U.S. Vice President in George Gershwin's 1931 musical Of Thee I Sing; of a heart attack; in East Islip...
Most of the drama's humor is of a puckish sort; it involves the archaic formalism of the Masters, or the shrewishness of Eva's nurse Magdelene. Eunice Alberts sang a delightfully sprightly nurse, but Thomas Hayward (her fumbling lover David) did not give his movements and voice color and conciseness and consistency necessary to a humor ostensibly quaint. So also James Billings as Beckmesser, Walther's rival for Eva, effectively deadened Wagner's critique of professional narrow-mindedness with his ill-controlled buffoonery...