Word: smitten
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...into it, shrug it off. Jackson has written and performed ebulliently with Paul McCartney; he often appears in bright band jackets; he has palled around a bit with Sean Ono Lennon and has taken him to a Broadway show. It should be clear from all this that Jackson is smitten not only with the Beatles' legacy but with their mystique. Unlike the Beatles, however, he has a vast audience but a small constituency...
Western pursuits are copied just as eagerly. Soviet youths who have come to love pizza and disco music are now smitten with skateboarding and jogging. Among the well educated in Moscow and Leningrad, Jane Fonda is a cult figure, but not for her politics. Her popularity stems from movies and, even more surprising, from bootlegged tapes of her exercise routines...
...attempt to demystify and de-mythify "the Bard" (a phrase that would never escape his lips unless they were twisted satirically), McKellen establishes two reference points between himself and Shakespeare. The first is that they were both helplessly smitten by the theater at tender ages. (He imagines a boyish Shake speare falling in behind a touring theatri cal company announcing its presence by parading down Stratford's main street; he recalls himself manipulating a cardboard Laurence Olivier and Jean Simmons in a toy-theater production of Hamlet.) The second is that both grew...
...Sesame Street. Stone's notion was to create a quest theme. The story opens as Big Bird (played, as he is on Sesame Street, by Caroll Spinney), roller-skates through Manhattan's Chinatown and admires a scroll depicting the legendary phoenix of China. He is smitten and resolves to go to China as a sort of avian Henry Kissinger, to tell the phoenix that "American birds think Chinese birds are just swell." Finding the phoenix is the problem. Big Bird and his shaggy sidekick Barkley the Dog (played with wonderful canine verisimilitude by Brian Muehl) must locate...
...this prankish revisionism, good-natured but a touch self-smitten, is the work of Peter Sellars, 25, the director who has worked similar changes on other classics: Handel's Orlando set at the Kennedy Space Center, King Lear featuring a Lincoln Continental. (Subject for a future master's thesis: Automotive Metaphor and the Sound of Cultural Collision in the Early Work of Peter Sellars.) Sellars clearly seeks not so much to rejustify all these stage pieces as to re-examine them, even reinvent them, for a contemporary audience. What is up-to-date in The Mikado is timeless...