Word: tediousness
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...average Broadway fare, hummable and with a simple, insistent beat. But his lyrics are often trite and vulgar. "Look under our glitz, muscles and tits," he writes in one song. Fierstein's book is sometimes forced; the campy scenes with the black maid/butler (William Thomas Jr.) quickly become tedious, for example Arthur Laurents' direction is occasionally jarringly awry, as when he has the mother of Jean-Michel's fiancee do a degrading bump-and-grind in her underwear...
...Shinefeld, her ex-husband, her friends and her feckless, casually cruel lover are all analysts, occupying a narrow world whose poles are the brownstones bordering Central Park and the beaches of the Hamptons. The doctor is preoccupied by a frequently tedious midlife crisis that seems trifling and ill motivated by comparison with the traumas of her benumbed patient. Dawn was born to a catatonic, who committed suicide when her child was an infant, and a male homosexual, who died in a boating accident a year later. She has been raised by a leathery lesbian aunt and her feminine girlfriend, whom...
Despite its apparent intrigue, the story is slow-moving and predictable at its best, simply tedious and dull at its worst. The characterization is vapid, and not just because the novel's richness is lost in the translation, Enchi restricts herself to describing the hair and skin color or the banal speculations of minor players in the story, ("Strong? Of course she is, but only on one level...") They seem to have no personality, no motivation for their actions, and only Yasuko, under her mother-in-law's spell, can be believable in such a state. The author fails miserably...
...most engaging aspect of the novel, the concept of masks from the No Dramas as a symbol for the facade individuals erect to hide their true feelings, loses its power and becomes lost in the quagmire of the tedious plot. By the time the sixth different character remarks that Mieko's face is reminiscent of a No mask, the symbol has become merely bothersome, a tool the author uses to justify the fact that no one understands or is aware of what Mieko is plotting...
...trial of Claus von Bülow for the attempted killing of his wife Sunny transformed family griefs into a Roman circus, and Journalist William Wright adopts a barker's tone in his recollection of the slack, tedious life of the idle rich. (Sunny rose at 11, rarely left the house except to go shopping, and employed eleven gardeners to manicure eleven acres.) He deftly records the countless lies and petty sins of the accused murderer, starting with the facts that Claus was neither a von nor a Bülow (his father, Svend Borberg, was a convicted...