Word: wan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...left him odd man out among friends, fellow authors and members of his children's generation: "Authority to these young people was Amerika, a bloodstained bugaboo to be crushed at any cost. To me, authority was the Shillington High School faculty, my father and his kindly and friendly, rather wan and punctilious colleagues, with whose problems and perspective I had had every opportunity to empathize...
...those shows would seem a godsend to the Wan White Way of the '80s. With three striking exceptions -- Dreamgirls, Big River and Into the Woods -- pretty much every noteworthy musical of the decade has been a revival, a recycling of old songs, an import (generally from Britain) or a critical smash but commercial also-ran. The current season, which by Broadway's calendar began in May, is more miserable than most. Its first American musical, Carrie, actually a slightly postponed holdover from last season, closed within five performances at a record loss of $7 million. The sole entry since, Legs...
Sometimes, alas, it is business as usual. This year's season opener, Giacomo Meyerbeer's hoary grand opera L'Africaine, typifies the ills that have afflicted the company. As Vasco da Gama, Tenor Placido Domingo sounds tired and wan, Maurizio Arena's conducting is enervated and Mansouri's own stage direction merely serviceable. Only veteran Soprano Shirley Verrett, as the regal Selika, captures the fiery spirit of Meyerbeer's diffuse and improbable last opera...
...President. In fact, for many voters under 30, he has become almost synonymous with the job itself; since World War II, only Dwight Eisenhower, that other benign patriarch, served as long a tenure in the White House. It is no mystery why a conventional politician like Bush seems so wan in comparison and why an unfettered challenger like Dukakis remains so cautious in attacking the incumbent. Reagan has molded public attitudes too much in his own cheerful, nostalgic image to permit otherwise...
...lower Mississippi River, which is supposed to run full and fat with spring water, is wan and puny, coughing up sandbars that have blocked as many as 130 towboats and 3,000 giant river barges filled with paper, grain and chemicals headed for market. Around Greenville and Vicksburg, Miss., the Army engineers have had to dredge an emergency channel in the shrinking river to & unclog the bizarre traffic jam. At Memphis low water levels broke all the records that had been put down on the books going back to 1872. But where somebody is losing a buck, there is always...