Word: twain
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...names of his favorite bands in black ink. He used to slap his thighs when he broke into his high-pitched cackle, a laugh that only comes from the South. When I first met him, he struck me as someone I had always known--probably from the Mark Twain I had read in high school...
...Mark Twain for the prosecution: "Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig . . . the Leatherstocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series." D.H. Lawrence for the defense: "Fenimore Cooper has probably done more than any writer to present the Red Man to the white man." For the reader: the Library of America, offering The Leatherstocking Tales in all their flawed glory...
...courage of the producers of three shows that have bucked this trend. All three lacked surefire commercial appeal, and all faced some critical skepticism, but they defied the doomsayers and hung on. Last week they were rewarded. Big River, a sweet, small, no-stars musical based on Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, captured ten nominations, one for best musical. Joe Egg, a searing and yet raucously funny story about the parents of a hopelessly retarded child, was nominated for three acting awards and for best revival. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, a bitter and explosive recollection...
...River sounds like an unlikely marriage: Mark Twain, giant of American literature, and Roger Miller, twangy country songwriter. Twain wrote penetratingly of the time when his nation was a frontier. Miller (Dang Me, King of the Road) provides at most a wistful echo of that era, a longing for the free and easy life now that there are few byways left to wander. But the musical, featuring 17 of Miller's down-home ditties, seems utterly natural, as full of unforced charm as Huck himself...
...picaresque ramblings of Huck (Daniel Jenkins), who runs away from the enslavements of civilization, and his friend Jim (Ron Richardson), a literal runaway slave, have been pared into a purposeful narrative without diminishing the aura of spontaneity. William Hauptman's book also sustains Twain's deeper exploration of how a society could view slavery as normal and regard assisting a runaway as a crime against property. The story starts slowly and wobbles in tone, but achieves the original's deft mix of social comment, slapstick farce, heartrending melodrama and boy's own tale of danger. Big River, which started...