Word: sheerly
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Since its birth, rock has produced a long string of guitar heroes, a list that would begin with Chuck Berry, continue on through Hendrix, Page and Eric Clapton, and include players of more recent vintage, like Eddie Van Halen and Living Colour's Vernon Reid--musicians celebrated for their sheer instrumental talent, their jazzman-like flair for expansive, showy (and sometimes self-indulgent) solos. But with the advent of alternative rock and grunge in the late '80s and early '90s, guitar heroism became uncool. Peter Buck of the influential rock band R.E.M. shies away from the exhibitionism of flashy solos...
...Stoppard's "Arcadia" has everything a Harvard student could want out of an evening at the theater--physics, literary theory, British accents, a battle of egos, and the efforts of academics to overcome their asexuality. The leads handle their parts well, the sets are lovely, and the sheer volumetric intensity of Stoppard's ultra-witty dialogue will intrigue, if occasionally confuse, the happy playgoer...
...minor characters, the problems lie mainly in the accents. Lady Croom (Linda Gehringer), Thomasina's mother, pronounces her humorous lines with an artificial shrillness, which lessened the sheer fun of watching her tyrannize the household. Captain Brice, RN (Anthony Newfield) is visually hysterical, wearing a hat the size of Derbyshire, but the play would benefit--epecially in terms of running time--if incidental characters like his were given fewer lines...
...stage is only one part of this show. Even more important is the soundtrack, in which Eliot's poem is made to undergo transformations he couldn't have imagined, and probably wouldn't much care for. Here, too, the sheer achievement is impressive; sound designer Amar Hamoudi prolongs a poem that would take five minutes to read aloud into a rhapsody of sound. Hamoudi, along with O'Maley, creates a series of moods based on the speed and intonation of the speaking voice, enhanced by various beats, snatches of music and random snatches of speech. (Some fragments of "The Waste...
...problem is simply that computer literacy in general has become more important to the world of technology, that is to say, the world of tomorrow, than literacy itself. This is evident by the sheer number of home pages that are empty or overfull but so lacking in content it appears their authors forgot the cardinal rule of basic: less is more. It seems now is the crucial time to question what traditional values are being washed away as we surf to tomorrow on the World Wide Web. Will vacuous banter on chat lines and bulletin boards take the place...