Word: venality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...much to be said for the other performances, since the other characters are all types, one-note foils for Mandel to play off of. Besides the aforementioned Evil Brother and Idealistic Scientist, there is the Boozing Wife, the Senile Cat Lady, the Crusty Backwoodsman, the Angry Neighbor, the Venal Lawyer, and the Stuck-up In-laws. Walk is basically Mandel's showpiece, and no one is allowed to upstage...
...than the U.S. Notable among them: Julie Hagerty, who makes Hildy's fiancee a genuine lure instead of a drippy debutante; Ed Lauter as the nastiest newsman; Jack Wallace as a dumb, obsequious but likable cop; Deirdre O'Connell as the doomed hooker; and Jerome Dempsey as a chillingly venal mayor. Tony Walton's set deftly uses a 65-ft. depth on the Vivian Beaumont stage to convey a cavernous public building in Roman Preposterous style, and Willa Kim's costumes evoke the era without prettifying it. Yet what lingers is not the production's fidelity but its brilliant reconsideration...
...couple of decades ago, when a scandal broke in Washington, almost nobody thought first of the President. Venal, clumsy aides were the instant suspects. Watergate turned all that on its head. We saw that the American presidency had gathered almost all the political authority of the federal establishment, and very little could happen without presidential involvement. With ultimate power came ultimate credit -- or blame...
...million advances. What do these vastly different writers have in common, besides a publisher named Dogwinkle? Well, there is sex, which the pun-loving Peter De Vries, 76, might call the great leveler. There are also the usual convoy of country-club dreadnoughts and assortment of foibles and venal sinning that go into the makings of De Vries' unusual comic novels. Peckham needs Poppy's financial support, and she yearns for his intellectual tutelage. What ensues is a zesty tale of patron and patronizer in which the student learns her lessons so well that she gains a highbrow reputation, while...
...charges that venal managers at NASA deliberately decided to ignore known problems that endangered the shuttle astronauts. But to cope with its unfamiliar duties in operating a dual-purpose passenger and cargo service, NASA created a decentralized structure that the Rogers commission is expected to criticize. Its headquarters in Washington lost effective control of its operational arms at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The centers, in turn, seemed uncertain about their relation to one another. At the same time, the private contractors supplying...