Word: slapsticking
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...Beth Newhall's direction chooses not to focus on the intellectual side of the show; it seems to have consisted mainly of inserting bits of physical comedy into the often tepid dialogue. Perhaps Colby should thank her for having done so, for this slapstick provides the balance of levity in the show...
...shows that Caroline is not lacking emotions, even though she represses them. Chocolat explores small-town life in 1950's France, and the effect that the mysterious stranger Vianne Rocher's opening of a humorously decadent chocolate shop has on the various townspeople. Some scenes in Chocolat are pure slapstick, such as, for example, when Vianne offers the conservative Comte de Reynaud (Alfred Molina), guardian of the village's morality, some chocolates called "Venus' Nipples." Some good moments of the movie are the humorous ones, such as the village priest Pere Henri (Hugh O'Conor) singing and dancing a rock...
...scene, meant to introduce her as a force of nature, has funny moments, but there's something offensive about a sitcom metafictionally begging you to love its star in its first three minutes. Make no mistake, Bette loves its lead, all too well. It indulges her with Lucy-esque slapstick (she wrestles an exercise machine! She bashes a block of frozen waffles!). It surrounds her with weak characters who merely react to her. It makes TV jokes ("Pretty soon I'll have my own series, and then I might just as well kill myself") that tell us how lucky...
Each vignette offers its own special pleasures. In the first, a dancing tableau-vivant of the Fragonard painting The Girl on the Swing, brings a disarmingly bawdy and slapstick flair to the more subdued trappings of the period. The second, which whimsically documents the liberation fantasies of a 1950s housewife, manages to disperse comic relief so widely that the result is not tragedy punctuated by humor but a remarkably entertaining dose of bittersweet...
Mark Morris, who loves opera almost as much as modern dance, has cooked up a new version of Four Saints in Three Acts, the 1934 surrealist collaboration between Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein. This production, which blends dance, mime and slapstick in the fanciful Morris manner, had its world premiere in London in June, and will make its eagerly anticipated U.S. debut at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, Calif., on Sept. 21. Michelle Yard, a much-admired addition to the Mark Morris Dance Group, is St. Teresa, and word is that she, pictured above with John Heginbotham, dances like, well...