Word: stridently
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...time, members of the Dartmouth Group labeled the Soviet attitude as unexpectedly negative, primarily because it came only one month after some relatively moderate public remarks by the new Soviet leader Konstantin U. Chernenko and some less strident comments to two visiting U.S. senators...
There was nothing artificial about the response when Jackson emerged to speak. His talks are not connected discourses but collections of applause lines that bring shouts of "All right! . . . Talk it up, Jesse! . . . Yessir!" building steadily. He begins slowly, his voice strong but not strident, his phrases short. He gathers speed and volume, often breaking into a cadence that scans well as impromptu free verse...
Awake and Sing! was immeasurably aided by the personnel of the new Group Theater, and by its star, a youth named John Garfield, who ignited the stage when he stepped upon it. But even they could not disguise the strident, metallic lyricism ("Say the word-I'll tango on a dime"). Nor can the current cast hide the muddled thoughts of the author, who felt that "new artworks should shoot bullets" but who filled the theater with smoke...
...fervent members of the Anybody-but-Jimmy-Carter Club, voicing criticisms that might have been taken from Reagan's campaign speeches: Carter was so vacillating and unpredictable that no one ever knew what he might do. Moscow at that point viewed Reagan as a standard Republican conservative whose more strident anti-Soviet proclamations were just campaign oratory. The Soviets recalled that Richard Nixon had won political prominence by talking stern antiCommunism, but in the White House turned into the prime American architect of U.S.-Soviet détente...
Elizabeth Swados has given Trudeau's lyrics (some of them witty and energetic) rhinestone settings; not one of her 14 tunes offers a memorable melody or a surprising chord pattern. It does surprise that Margo Sappington's choreography is so stunningly inept, that the cast is strident and charmless. In turning some likable icons of the center-left into show-biz brats, this musical Doonesbury emerges as a vision of '70s youth only Richard Nixon could love. -By Richard Corliss