Word: unctuously
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WETHERBY'S MYSTERY IS NOT "Whodunit?" but "Why did he do it here?"--a bloody good practical joke. A young man shows up at a small dinner party and is graciously assumed to be someone's guest as he mixes with the unctuous ease of an unreconstructed Yuppie. The next day he enters his hostess' warm kitchen, sits, chats ... and shoots his brains onto the stucco wall...
...even the middle-roader melodies like "Skin Deep" can't conceal the hard edges of old; a slight snarl lurks under Burnel's voice, even at its most unctuous. The eardrum-bursting sarcasm of songs like "Bring on the Nubiles" still lingers in the earlobe-singeing insinuations of bourgeois S&M in Punch & Judy...
Although Odets was 28 when he wrote Awake and Sing!, he could grant only his older characters credibility. As Bessie, Nancy Marchand has a despairing authority, and as her brother Morty, Michael Lombard combines unctuous self-regard and bone-deep insecurity. As the old, unrepentant radical Jacob, Paul Sparer provides a sense of guttering energy that is supposed to illuminate the hopes of the young. It does nothing of the kind. Brother and sister, husband and lover all perform in a declamatory style more appropriate to pageants than to plays. Moreover, Theodore Mann's direction takes the Bergers...
...when they're sure you're not an unctuous agitator for Prospect Club, they are willing to talk to you freely, gather, gather around and tell you calmly about the fist fight at the meeting when Court Club decided to cut its Jewish quota in half because an unintentional influx one year was causing its prestige to flag; about what an ICC president told one of them privately and with a certain sadness one day, that "anti-Semitism in the clubs is something that can neither be exposed, nor proved, nor cured"; about the tacit and explicit demands of club...
...grating, one-note performance. But there is very good work by Madora Thomson, whose fluent, hammy gestures and Bryn Mawr accent are both funny and seductive; by Christopher Randolph, an endearing, intelligent, convincingly lived-in old Pantalone, fresh vet familiar; and by the director, whose seemingly effortless, unctuous gigolo is a model of how this kind of comedy should be played. Good as his performance is, he would have done better absenting himself and spreading those good instincts around...