Word: wailful
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BELLS GONG in the dark. Sirens wail. Lights fade in on three corpses on a stage...
...black, and the city pops on in a fluorescent amber. It has a noise, this city, like a train or a wail. Tonight the carnival's noise prevails. The place is packed, the faces glowing orange and red in the wild spinning lights. At the giant revolving swing, a man solemnly takes tickets and the children mount the seats in pairs. Slowly the machine turns; slowly the nickelodeon starts up; and the chains that hold the swings grow taut until they parallel the ground. Suddenly the children are on their sides in the air, whirling above Belfast, impelled from...
...Tour's tone was deep, soft, mournful, Anne Bancroft's is a fierce wail. She slips into the upper register of emoting-angry shrugs, haughty profiles, spat-out defiance-and stays there. The result is that Bancroft has nowhere to go when, at the end of each act, she needs to escalate into the play's most demanding scenes. Surely her approach is the one Director William Friedkin wanted; his work in films (The French Connection, The Exorcist) is notable for its harrowing power, not its subtlety. This leaves Max von Sydow, as the doctor, to prowl...
...funk in Rocker Ted Nugent. His hair hangs in crimped strands halfway down his bare, sweaty chest, and he talks in a singsong urban-punk cadence about how to stay straight while being more cool than the druggies. When he sings, the mild jingle becomes a heavy-rhythm wail...
...lamentations about how awful work is prompt an answering wail from the management side of the chasm: nobody wants to work any more. As American productivity, once the exuberant engine of national wealth, has dipped to an embarrassingly uncompetitive low, Americans have shaken their heads: the country's old work ethic is dead. About the only good words for it now emanate from Ronald Reagan and certain beer commercials. Those ads are splendidly mythic playlets, romantic idealizations of men in groups who blast through mountains or pour plumingly molten steel in factories, the work all grit and grin. Then...