Word: shrewdness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...uphill from there. Today Sokolof's privately held firm, the Phillips Manufacturing Co., has 120 employees and two Omaha plants that specialize in producing various dry-wall channels and metallic building studs. Profits from the company and some shrewd stock investments have made Sokolof a wealthy man, with a fortune that he admits is "well into eight figures...
...been celebrated in song (by Frank Loesser and Phil Ochs, among others) and screenplay (its Art Deco building on Manhattan's 42nd Street was reporter Clark Kent's workplace in the Superman movies). For the tabloid's fans, Maxwell's moxie may prove congenial. He has shown a shrewd feel for the city's odd blend of worldliness and parochialism. Playing to Manhattanites' penchant for embracing almost any outsider who professes himself instantly smitten with their metropolis, Maxwell arrived by yacht to start negotiations and, before stepping into a waiting Cadillac, spoke the tantric words, "I love New York." Recalling...
...SNOW BALL. Wasp laureate A.R. Gurney (The Cocktail Hour, Love Letters) is a shrewd chronicler of social class customs and conflicts in this Hartford Stage mounting (also to appear at San Diego's Old Globe) of a new play with music and dance adapted from his poignant novel. It shows the seductive folly of revisiting past pleasures -- for a generation that revives its youthful midwinter gala and for a pair of former partners, perfect on the dance floor but not off, reunited in a last bittersweet waltz...
...major venues. The vital thing they share is a determination to push comedy toward its mainstream limits. Absent Friends, from 1974, prefigures later and even darker works, too many not yet seen in the U.S. Lynne Meadow, who directed Woman in Mind better than Ayckbourn himself, is again shrewd, save in miscasting the clueless Peter Frechette as the guest. Fortunately, Brenda Blethyn is perfect as the nerved-up hostess. More productions like this (and fewer like the coarse, clumsy version of Taking Steps, which no fan should attend) may at last bring Ayckbourn an American acclaim...
...diametric opposite, the mercurial, spiritually obsessed Jewish homosexual Jacob: it was the vein of mystical imagery, the fascination with arcana, the tarot and the figure of the artist as Hermes Trismegistus, that pervades the Blue Period and culminates in his first masterpiece, La Vie, 1903. Likewise, Richardson is very shrewd about Picasso's relations with Stein, pointing out how her egotism was so resistant to his that she became one of his early real-life icons: her bulky presence, Richardson speculates, fused with childhood memories of his mother, led to the unnaturally massive torsos of his postwar classical nudes...