Word: weirdness
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Composer Alan Menken won four Oscars for the movies The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast with lyricist Howard Ashman. For the stage, they created Little Shop of Horrors. After Ashman died of AIDS in 1991, Menken tried various collaborators. WEIRD ROMANCE, which opened off-Broadway last week, shows how much he misses Ashman's storytelling. The two one-acts (book by Alan Brennert and lyrics by David Spencer) blend zippy tunes with cliche science fiction. A witty, upbeat song recalls how a boy fell in love with lab testing, and Ellen Greene sings gorgeous ballads. But what...
Less boppy students will describe orientation week as an "ordeal," or at least call it "weird." They find the placement tests too challenging, idiotic and numerous, and the ice-breaker events too shallow. The hi-what's-your-name-where-are-you-from-what's-y our-dorm-well-nice-to-meet-you mantra grows old very quickly, and the days become a blur of cookouts, sweaty parties and fierce scamming...
...Batman TV series, Burgess Meredith played Penguin as a kind of deranged F.D.R. This was not for DeVito. "I didn't see myself playing a weird Nick Charles with a martini glass and a tuxedo," he says. "It just didn't tickle my fancy." Then Burton showed him a painting he had done of "a toddler with a big round head and big eyes and a protrusion in the nose and mouth and a bulbous body with little appendages. And there was a caption that said, 'My name is Jimmy, but they call me the hideous penguin...
What is going on? Experts say fluctuations from normal readings are, well, normal and that weird weather is the rule, not the exception. But the highs and lows and wets and drys over the past two years have been so extreme that anxious questions are arising. Could these outbursts of wacky weather be related to those fires from the gulf war? That hole in the ozone layer? The global warming trend that environmentalists have been predicting for so many years...
...That I am a successful young writer is a weird though," he says. "On paper I am sometimes surprised. I would reluctantly say I was successful. Mostly other people tell me that...