Word: rococo
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Gumbooted Bears. Ayckbourn is one of England's funniest, most prolific playwrights, with a fine ear for middle-class patterns of speech. Sometimes his dialogue snaps back like Noel Coward's; at others, he evokes P.G. Wodehouse's rococo style. It is a shame that this production fails to do him or Norman justice. A man who envisions Australia in winter as an army of gumbooted koala bears and who can find menace in his pajamas ("The tops are alright-it's the bottoms you've got to watch") must be lovable. Richard Benjamin...
...images of the Americas. In the mid-16th century another Portuguese artist, doubtless inspired by reports of Caribbean cannibalism, painted an Inferno whose Satan wears a feather crown. But in general it was the noble Indian who would predominate. He became decorative in the late 17th century and positively rococo in the 18th, peering from cartouches, dallying under formalized palms. The ideas of Rousseau transmuted him into a red-skinned Cato or Brutus garbed in instinctive rectitude. And as he began to perish along the white frontier, the theme of racial destruction in a wild, vast landscape evoked lamentations from...
...priests of thanatology, who describe dying as terminal living," or the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare who explained a $61.7 million cut in social services as "advance downward adjustments." But whatever mirth there may be in these and other buffooneries, euphemisms, pomposities tautologies evasions and rococo lies, they are also signals of a new brainlessness in public language that coincides with a frightening ineptitude for reading and writing among the young...
Guaranteed Eagles. For other vacationers who crave the exhilaration of the outdoors with some catered comforts as well, there is British Columbia's Nicola River Valley. Little known even to Canadians is the Quilchena Cattle Co.'s rococo 18-room hotel and 25,000-acre working ranch, about 250 miles northeast of Vancouver. Guy Rose, owner of the ranch and grandson of its founder, never advertises his off-offbeat hotel, "so we don't get a bunch of people here we wouldn't like." The lakefront hotel was built in 1908, has a bullet-riddled...
Tchalkovsky's Variations on a Rococo Theme, Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy as orchestrated by Liszt, and the Brahms Violin Concerto; Yo-Yo Ma, cello, Richard Kogan, piano, Lynn Chang, violin. The St. Lowell-in-the-Fields Orchestra, Gerald Moshell, conductor; Lowell House Dining Hall; two performances...