Word: whelmed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...towels up around their faces to conceal them from the members of the press and the old black men lounging in the shade of a melt-your-polyester-shirt-by-seven August morning. Yes, this was it, this was the Big Time Under the Big Top, Perspire Under the Whelm as it were; this was It, the Big Meltdown. Perhaps it should be explained, start at the beginning, linear like, a very good place to start as Julie Andrews informed us in the dawn of our existence back in those sweaty movie theatres of Pittsburgh and Grosse Point and Santa...
Nijinsky is Béjart's most ostentatious work to date. In it his flair for the spectacular, the mod and the grotesque is overwhelming, in ways that admittedly may whelm some more than others. Equipped with enough stage runways for a good suburban airport, adorned ominously by the obligatory -or so it seems these days-cross of Calvary, Nijinsky is essentially an old-fashioned allegory play dolled up for the stoned age. Its recounting of the life of the great Russian dancer is set to a schizoid musical score (electronics by Pierre Henry, schmalz by Tchaikovsky...
SOMETIMES IT GETS a little too frenzied and desperate. The Upper Common Room in Adams House is not a particularly big place, and it is easy to over-whelm the audience by overplaying a role. "Going to Pot" suffers a bit from a tendency in that direction. Lyle Shaw, as Follavoine, occasionally gets carried away while demonstrating his emotions, and has a little trouble maintaining a consistent portrayal of a chamber pot magnate. As his wife Julie, Wendy Walker manages a couple of very good moments as she waxes lyrical in several bathetic incidents. But almost unpardonably she begins giggling...