Word: scrim
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Looking like a nineteenth century candy sampler resting on a mammoth paper doily, the printed scrim that greets the Loeb audience is engagingly nostalgic. Unfortunately, the production of The Matchmaker that unfolds behind it is as overly sweet as the candy one would expect to find...
...should I play this scene, Mr. Chaplin?" Reply: "Behind me and to the left." It was more than a critique of the star's egomania; it was also a comment on his politics. From the start, Chaplin was a fan of sentimental collectivism, of revolution seen through a scrim. He needed no Bolshevik primer on poverty. Charlie had risen from the darkest of London slums. His father was a drunk; his mother sewed blouses for 1½ pence per. He and his half brother Sydney had gone the rounds of London's forbidding schools for the destitute. Chaplin...
...show's many dance numbers are mesmeric revels. The cast is totally winning, and so are the demon drummer and his galvanizing group up behind the scrim. In midsummer New York, Golden Bat is a surprising tonic for which one can only say arigato...
...actually begins to move-yet, even here, there is some dawdling. One climactic scene is followed by a song in which the show's urchin-narrators merely recap the action, making no additional comment on the scene we have just seen. The number takes place in front of the scrim. and possibly the only reason for its existence is to allow the sets to be changed. In addition, there is the clambake scene, whose importance to the second act escapes me, but which features a pointless dance number so old-fashioned that even Agnes de Mille wouldn't touch...
...over several decades. The radical young dwell in a projection of the '70s. The values of many of their fathers are the ethics of the Depression, of World War II or the later '40s. In the imagination of his ideals, the Middle American glimpses cracked snapshots through a scrim: a khaki uniform, trousers gathered at the waist; a souvenir samurai sword; a "ruptured duck"; a girl with Betty Grable hair and hemline; the lawn of a barely remembered house. The ideological order that he sees is a civics-book sense of decency. The Depression taught him the wisdom of accumulation...