Word: somberness
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...suitable context for the action as a whole which is precisely this production's main failing. The set is too dowdy to help much; and the contrast in acting styles is matched by sometimes inappropriate shifts in mood. The extremely dark lighting in the last scene is overly somber for the revelatory nature of the action, while many of Marchbanks' scenes descend too far into farce. The proper Shavian mix of irony and humor, tragedy and comedy remains elusive...
...young Democrat v. saucy, short and blunt old Republican. Young Democrat with twelve years' experience in elective office; old Republican with none. In the race between the Democratic transplanted Easterner and the Japanese-American-immigrant Republican, charges of racism are hurled-at the immigrant. Young Democrat is generally somber-suited, dark-tied, prim and proper. His opponent's jaunty tarn o'shanter has become a symbol for the unconventionality he savors in both dress and speech. It could happen only in California, and whether the voters will opt for slight quirkiness or substantial blandness in the final...
...years it seemed that Novelist Muriel Spark had talent to burn. Then, in the late 1960s, a suspicion arose that burning was exactly what she had done with it. Gone was the somber exuberance of such earlier triumphs as Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means. The froth turned sour and her amused awareness of human daffiness was drowned in simple venom. The Abbess of Crewe (1974), Spark's deft parody of Watergate set in an English convent, gave reason to hope that all was not lost. The Takeover proves that nothing...
...specter is a somber one: of frightened individuals preparing for a racial Armageddon. In Rhodesia, no group has been more willful and less realistic than the whites, who refused throughout the 1960s to consider the alternative path of an orderly transition to majority rule. It is good for them, for the Rhodesian blacks, and for just about everybody else that the wrongheaded rebellion is at an end, and the financial "safety net" will certainly ease the blow. Yet, as members of Kissinger's flying squad of negotiators acknowledged, there was something poignant about the way Smith finally bowed...
Inside the doorway, we stopped to sign the rice-paper pages of the funeral book. The atmosphere was somber, almost religious. An atonal Chinese funeral dirge seemed to intensify the silence of the mourners and the tomblike coolness of the air-conditioned hall. The chamber was filled with row upon row of white mourning wreaths. At the end of a red carpet 50 yards ahead of us stood Mao's funeral bier, a glass-topped coffin planted in a bed of bright green grasses, layered with formal yellow chrysanthemums and red hibiscuses in full bloom. Dominating that...