Word: tone
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...coherence. Nor does Chris Clemenson's Gloucester provide even a hunch-backed spine to this play. He is too fretful, laborious, lumbering. In past productions, Clemenson has used his expressive and modulated voice to define a character. Here however, the lighting often shields his face and his changes in tone seem unusually grating. Only after Gloucester's blinding does he add subtle vision to his performance, staggering to the edge of the Dover cliffs and pitching forward to a living death...
...Connally is tactless, he is also tainted. Big John's close ties with former President Nixon and the shadows of the milk-fund scandal certainly have not helped his cause. In an uncharacteristically hesitant tone, Connally recently sideswiped a reporter's question about how, as President, he would deal with the report that Treasury Secretary G. William Miller's onetime charge, Textron Inc., bribed foreign officials. "I wouldn't pass judgment on whether or not he knew or whether he should have known," Connally said. "That's something that I don't have the information on which to base...
...tone of the picture veers from the grotesque (eating binges whenever Dom DeLuise, as the title heavyweight, becomes anxious or unhappy) to the hysterical (members of his excitably loving Italian family yelling at him whenever he gorges himself). There is also a sentimental love story: the hero falls for a sweet, dumbish blond (Candice Azzara) who runs the gift shop around the corner from his card shop. As for the gags, they are mindlessly farcical: an examination at the diet doctor's features standard jokes about hospital gowns and a nicotine-addicted physician who coughs in the patient...
Bias certainly doesn't explain the hectoring tone in the press when a candidate doesn't perform up to his potential. It's more like a fight promoter's attempt to ensure a well-balanced card. Thus David S. Broder, contrasting Howard Baker's inept campaign in Maine with "the Howard Baker that Washington knows," concludes censoriously: "The man on the stump in this presidential campaign is a double who invites ridicule." James Reston reproves the voters themselves because John Anderson of Illinois, "a good man in a bad time," doesn't fare better...
Part 3 of the cycle, in tone and text the work of Euripides, is almost anticlimactic, partly because of the caliber of the plays and partly because of the treatment...