Word: smash
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ride a trend. In the '60s he wrote a cycle of extravagant farces, most of them failures on and off Broadway. Orton would not bow to the times, but circumstances eventually bent to him. His last play, What the Butler Saw, is now an off-Broadway smash. The American stage production of Entertaining Mr. Sloane lasted only 13 performances; the film version is a savagely witty success. True, the play's surroundings have been cinematically expanded, and a better cast lends the characters fresh distinction and intensity. Yet for the most part it is not the work that...
...does have its moments: Pinball Wizard, for example, is explosive, driving, topnotch-hard rock. As a complete piece of musical theater, though, Tommy is pretentious and embarrassing stuff from one of the most gimmick-prone groups in all rock. The Who's favorite pre-Tommy stunt was to smash their guitars, loudspeakers and drums at the end of every set. At the Met, save for their own vaudeville antics onstage (Singer Roger Daltrey twirling his mike like a lasso, Peter Townshend playing his guitar with showy windmills of his right arm), there was no drama, no staging, no characterization...
What made it a smash hit, and far more than an expanded honeymooners skit, was the Nichols style: timing, vibrance and a slavish attention to detail. Nichols and failure became antonyms. Barefoot was followed by The Knack, Luv and The Odd Couple. The director came to resemble Somerset Maugham's nouveau novelist, Alroy Kear, who read that genius was an infinite capacity for taking pains. "If that was all, he must have told himself, he could be a genius like the rest...
...seeming weakening of some institutions and attacks on institutions. Of immediate relevance to us as lawyers is that gnawing doubt whether our system of justice, especially criminal justice, is sturdy enough to withstand the assaults which are leveled at it. Some say we must "crack down," that we must "smash" the challengers and restore tight discipline. In periods of stress there are always some voices raised urging that we suspend fundamental guarantees and take short cuts as a matter of self-protection. But this is not our way of doing things short of a great national emergency...
...frame-up because we are innocent, and are only being brought before the CRR because of the political context of the "crime." As members of the SDS Radical Arts Troupe, we were performing on the top step and kicking against the door to simulate a beat for our latest smash hit, "The Book of War." We noticed several minutes afterward that one panel in the door had cracked. In similar fashion, the cast of Marat/Sade managed one night to break a window pane in the Adams House Dining Hall; they were not charged by the CRR. Nor was the student...