Word: scarecrow
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When The Wiz was previewing in Detroit five years ago, it looked as if the Yellow Brick Road might lead back to Kansas, not Broadway. Applause was limper than the Scarecrow's limbs. Then Geoffrey Holder, who had designed the costumes, was asked to doctor the production. Holder brought the part of the Wiz into sharp focus, wowed the audience with a black tornado stirred up with 100 yds. of silk streamers, and exhorted the frazzled cast members to believe in themselves. It all worked: The Wiz won the 1975 Tony Award for best musical...
...singer of the Supremes. Ross is 34, so the script calls for a Dorothy who is 24 and a shy schoolteacher. This is awkward, because if the fantasy is to succeed, Dorothy must be childlike enough to be terrified of witches and wizards, and to talk trustingly with a scarecrow, a lion and a tin man. A woman of 24 who is that innocent should not be teaching school...
...turned hundreds of juvenile spray-paint vandals into graffiti figures. The yellow brick road leads across the Brooklyn Bridge to the World Trade Center, where Richard Pryor reigns as the Wiz. But before Dorothy gets there, she meets a roarious but cowardly lion (Ted Ross) and a marvelous scarecrow (Michael Jackson), hung up on his pole and tormented by rascally birds. Jackson sings a piteous lament, to the effect that "you can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game." Wiz Composer Charlie Smalls is a gifted comic writer...
Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in the course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means . . . Innumerable, children have been born into the cause. . . innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit...
...experiments will end. In addition to a trilogy of black- and blue-humored novels (Tlooth, The Conversions, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium), Mathews has recently composed poems to be printed on Mobius strips; works based on algorithms; and even a sentence that, spoken by a crow to a scarecrow, contains in sequence the sounds of all the letters in the alphabet: "Hay, be seedy! He-effigy, hate-shy jaky yellow man, oh peek, you are rusty, you've edible, you ex-wise he!" To fashion such creations, the OuLiPoians must be, as Martin Gardner characterizes them, "whimsical...