Word: vapidly
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...singing chorus is usually inarticulate, due partly to John Hollander's music; the dancing chorus, while legitimately formal, appears vapid against the strident actors; Cedric Whitman's translation hits the bump that jolts all colloquial renderings. The Greek dramatists are often not colloquial. They are, however, very, too, clever...
Cork, Author Hawley has a knowing way with business lingo. While Cash and Lory's vapid love scenes tax patience as well as belief, the vitality of Cash McCall rests in its forceful portrait of a venture capitalist who is as remote from a backslapping booster as Reinhold Niebuhr is from Norman Vincent Peale...
...journalistic in tone, too diffuse and shapeless in movement. Under Director Herman Shumlin's able supervision, there are plenty of vivid snapshots and plenty of lively moments, but the play provides no sustained drama. And what does seem fictional seems all too much so: a vapid love story between Scopes and a hard-shell preacher's daughter; a Mencken who talks more like a smarty-pants cribbing from the real Mencken's prose. But if Inherit the Wind is not quite up to snuff as a play, it is often effective theater...
...Redcoats. In the former, Sourian seems to keep a careful eye upon his intended audience, "well-dressed rich foreign dull stupid boys and girls who should all be choked" and yet who, I can't help thinking, he hopes will be shocked and delighted by the escapades of his vapid figures. Miss Lang's poem, in spite of the skill of its language (whose beauty must be assessed through its sustained tone rather than by individual lines), manipulates its whole argument in terms of the academism which it purports to attack, and sounds finally more like a whimper than...
Although the program claims that the play is "A New Comedy," there is only one amusing line all evening. That is delivered by a horse who, for some reason, wanders on stage. Coming at the end of a particularly vapid line by the leading man, Tom Helmore, it serves as a short, and probably unrehearsed, comment on proceedings. It was probably unrehearsed because the horse's timing was slightly off for best comic effect; but then he (or, perhaps, she) is not being paid Equity rates for a speaking part, and you can't get top talent for horsefeed...