Word: vaudevillian
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...pervading color of Ends and Odds is gray, a bleak miasma that convinces one character that "the earth must have got stuck, one sunless day, in the heart of winter." This backdrop accentuates the odd, vaudevillian turns that Beckett still keeps in his repertoire. He tosses off one-liners with apparent ease: "Ah, Morvan, you'd be the death of me if I were sufficiently alive!" His precise stage directions insist that props misfire with exquisite timing. He can make a character comment on a bit of stage business while implying a condemnation of life: "This gag has gone...
...past few seasons the Theater of the Absurd has seemed like an endangered dramatic species. Purebred examples of the genre, with their vaudevillian non sequiturs, wryly autumnal philosophizing about existence and wackily disconcerting knee-jerk humor, have become rare. In part, audiences have adjusted to the metaphysical void that permeates absurdist drama, the absence of meaning and purpose that so puzzled and infuriated them when the early Pinter plays appeared...
...that one understands why Schlesinger ended the film with such a desperate flourish. All the characters from the book are here: Homer Simpson (Donald Sutherland in a fine performance), the boggled Midwesterner whose hands, West said, "had a life of their own"; Harry Greener (Burgess Meredith), a busted-down vaudevillian whose daughter Faye (Karen Black) is the sort of teasing, intemperate beauty who slaughters men with a smile. Karen Black is a bothersome actress at best, strident and sloppy; she does not even have what acting schools call "the physical apparatus" to be sensual. Faye represents another hopeless dream whose...
...glorified furnace closet than any kind of backstage rest stop. The equal ceiling was gnarled with heating pipes, and about ten feet, back--where the room slightly used out to its end--crouched an old fat furnace, gurgling away through most of the show. Next to it stood a vaudevillian theatre mirror lined with a few dusty but brightly lit bulbs. Old pop cans, boxes, and performance notes decked the floor and walls, and a new bottle of "Syntax" hand lotion sat ready for use on one of the two midget benches opposite me. There was a sense here...
Died. Miriam Young, 62, novelist (Heaven Faces West) and children's book writer whose bestselling autobiography about life with her vaudevillian parents (Mother Wore Tights) was turned into one of Hollywood's most extravagant movie musicals of the 1940s; of cancer; in Lake Katonah...