Word: skillfulness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Geez," sighed the admiring sound-effects man, "whatta warmup!" The comedian had long since expressed his contempt for his own skill in that field: "Warming up a studio audience is like warming up dry ice. When you've done it, what have...
...plot is slight and suspenseless, and not steered with-much skill. It is the professor, with his crotchets, jokes and advice, that gives the play a fitful animation; and an assortment of minor characters, most of them fellow-warriors of the colonel, that give it color and geniality. They keep popping in & out, seldom doing anything more striking than singing songs, drinking toasts, dabbling in the past, dreaming toward the future. But they frequently do all these things in a gay and human fashion, and occasionally their war experiences give the characters an unexpected third dimension...
...humor is uninhibited only to the extent that it would be exceedingly embarrassing to take a girl to hear it, even for laughs. At intervals a motley band of women of all sizes and shapes troops back and forth across the stage, each with as much skill and expression as a Russian dancing bear. One suspects sometimes that these are visiting friends or relations of the management...
Rising from its ashes, the Advocate phoenix has managed to get aloft, though it still has to learn to straighton up and fly right. While the poetry is consistently excellent, the four stories do not all show professional skill, but all provocatively give promise of better work. Lured by Dave Self's splendid cover and five tasteful sketches, the reader will be disappointed by the unimaginative makeup and by the promise of a second and maybe a third pointless article on the UN by Stephen Schwebel...
Delicately balancing his fantasy with realistic psychological probing, Harold Wendell Smith shown skill and imagination equally in "The Fireman's Hat," though the ending is somewhat unsatisfying. Where Smith succeeds in avoiding obviousness and pompous language in portraying a character, Alan Friedman's "All Truth Is a Lie" partly fails. Starting with an interesting and mature idea, 'Friedman has constructed a somewhat nebulous story in which the author's manipulations are all too evident. The writing is good, but the Virginia Woolf-ish musing on Life and the nature of Time, though well-adapted to the story, is overworked...