Word: solemnizations
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...least marvel about this Dream is Epstein's ability to draw humor from the play even as he is interpreting it in an essentially solemn way. We expect the rustics and their "Pyramus and Thisbe" to be a comic staple, and certainly John Bottoms's eponymous, stage-struck Bottom, Jeremy Geidt's paternal, befuddled Quince, Max Wright's scallion-chomping Flute and their cohorts dig up laughs you'd only guessed at, reading the play. But the young lovers, too, keep their scenes from bogging down into indistinguishable, interchangeable laments: Sloan's strong-willed and-armed Helena gets a hapless...
...tiny tap dancer, like Shir ley Temple, with rouged cheeks and an anthropophagous smile; she is Sara Stimson, a cute, brown-haired, solemn-funny child. She is seven years old, and she does just fine. She and Matthau play a nice scene in his room, when she says she is hungry and he gives her some dry corn flakes in a bowl. Crunch, crunch, crunch...
...life that Sellers invented, that keep audiences caring about this poor befogged man. In one scene, like the child he is, he carefully avoids stepping on cracks to keep bad luck at bay. The doctor tells him to keep his weight off his injured leg, and like some solemn, obedient stork, he then and there lifts it off the floor. Or, submitting to a telephone interview, after the President has quoted him in a speech, he catches sight of a TV exercise class and begins aping the movements of the instructor?movements he repeats later when MacLaine tries to seduce...
...watches from his hospital bed as a pretentious television critic tears apart The Stand-up, rating it half-a-balloon out of a possible four. Among her criticisms: "Razzle-dazzle obliterates story." Well, in All That Jazz, Fosse has integrated the razzle-dazzle into the movie's themes with solemn thoroughness. It's a clever idea to present a choreographer's nightmares as gaudy, Dantesque versions of Busby Berkeley, but the movie has four of these sequences and they're not short. (They account for approximately 30 minutes.) Fosse has never before failed to find weird beauty in sleaze...
...amiability of early music. Over the drone of string tones, plangent woodwinds pipe and trill, punctuated occasionally by bells or the shiver of tambourines. The singers spin out long, pure lines, immaculate in pitch and virtually free of vibrato. There are intricate madrigals, courtly love ballads, ribald drinking songs, solemn liturgical anthems, sprightly dances. Between numbers, Director Michael Jaffee, 41, may look up from his lute and chat engagingly to the audience about the music. The whole effect is blessedly unfussy, with none of the chilly fastidiousness of those early music groups that bear their authenticity like a penance...