Word: puppyish
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Porter really were to lend approval, it would be chiefly for Patti LuPone. As Nightclub Belter Reno Sweeney, she rivals the role's originator, Ethel Merman, in volume and clarity of voice, and far outdoes her in intelligence and heart. CoStar Howard McGillin has shirt-ad looks, puppyish charm and a lilting tenor. Other delights: Tony Walton's Art Deco ocean-liner set, Paul Gallo's seascape lighting and Michael Smuin's crisp choreography. The supporting cast is mostly ordinary, and Kathleen Mahony-Bennett's oomphless ingenue is not even that. The book, by P.G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton...
...Viet Nam. Some of the funniest scenes depict the white-collar macho of bureaucrats who react to caution as a sign of deficient manhood. Reddin's cutting strokes are more often subtle, as in brief, oddly sympathetic glimpses of Castro and Richard Nixon. The central character is an eager, puppyish former Yalie tapped to train the invaders in communications. Peter MacNicol--best known as the neophyte writer Stingo in the film Sophie's Choice--is brilliant in the part, shifting from gawky innocence to sadder but wiser recollection and infusing it all with the self- intoxicating energy...
...That Look off Your Face, to a delicate ballad, Come Back with the Same Look in Your Eyes. D'Amboise is limited to three facial expressions: wide-eyed wonder, hangdog hurt and a nod of sudden understanding. But he bounces through the ballet routines with every bit of the puppyish appeal that Peters has already attributed to him in her songs, and has a charming exchange with a chance acquaintance (Gregg Burge) who dazzlingly teaches him to tap. Together the enamored pair brings off the quirkiest of love stories: in the latest and not the least of Lloyd Webber...
...bleak, minimalist school of New Yorker writers who have succeeded Updike, Cheever, and Salinger. Though Robison writes the occasional Salingeresque sentence ("One morning I was fixing cinammon toast of something and I had to practically he on the counter to keep from going into a complete faint") such puppyish exaggeration is rare. Like Ann Beattie and Frederick Barthelme, she casts a cold and detached eye on her characters, and tends to write spare prose about her spare people. People, what's more, who are distanced from their emotions. We see them the outside, largely through dialogue and physical movements. Even...
...usage and the maintenance of grammatical traditions? No, Dickson has no ideological purpose. He is the amiable spieler who wrote such frivolities as The Great American Ice Cream Book and The Mature Person's Guide to Kites, Yo-Yos, Frisbees . . . As for words, he nuzzles them all with puppyish enthusiasm...