Word: windbags
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Best Actor in a Supporting Role" goes to both veteran Fenton and new-comer Lee Poulis '02 as Don Alhambra, the Grand Inquisitor. Fenton carries off the part of the enterprising, officious windbag with the perfect amount of dull pomposity and cornball silliness and is matched by Kristin Brouwer in the part of the saucy but snotty, Duchess. Poulis mixes equal parts stodgy bureaucrat, fiendish Inquisitor and lecherous old man to take the typical Gilbert and Sullivan "uptight official" role to new, uproariously deadpan heights...
...witness remained polite throughout, never once leaping over the table, grabbing an inquisitor by his ears and screaming, "Hey, flannel mouth--does the phrase 'posturing hypocrite windbag' ring a bell?" Indeed, I sometimes fantasize about being subpoenaed to such a hearing, just for the chance to hit back. I've got my answers ready: "Excuse me, sir; did you develop your devotion to morality before or after you left your second wife for that podiatrist's assistant?" "Senator, when you ask about a cover-up, are you referring to that pathetically unconvincing toupee?" "I'll make you an offer, Congressman...
...effect on French literature exceeded anything short of the Bible itself. Flaubert, Baudelaire, Gautier all stood in his shadow, along with foreigners like Dostoyevsky and Conrad. In the words of English scholar Graham Robb, whose brilliant new biography, Victor Hugo (Norton; 682 pages; $39.95), does for this sublime windbag what George Painter did for Proust 30 years ago, Hugo was "a one-man education system through which every writer had to pass...The story of Hugo's influence after death is the story of a river after it reaches the sea. It was so pervasive that he was sometimes thought...
Such questions begged to be asked throughout the play. Though there were moments of unqualified genius (having the audience fill out a fake survey, for instance, or putting the curtain call in the middle, for instance, or allowing "The Dry Salvages" to speak through the windbag New Bedford fisherman--again, the versatile Monteleoni), the intellectual demands # made on its audience took their toll on our sense of the pleasure of drama. Perhaps the discombobulation of meaning in # is only perceived, or at least fully deliberate--in either case one must report one's own failure of understanding. This...
...tail of another, and another, and another, changes instantly when the names of certain cops, or that judge, are uttered. His eyes bug out, his neck tenses, and another Myles, a chilling character, crawls out of his skin. He breathes fire when he calls the judge "a vapid windbag and a pathetic martinet...