Word: witness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Neither he nor Swados has the foggiest notion of Carroll's substance or sensibility. The Alice books are funny. This show is frowningly earnest. Wit requires a surrounding quiet in order to be heard. This show is noisy, bustling, full of motion but lacking in any discernible destination. Carroll was a master of wordplay. In this "adaptation," whatever words survive from the original are drowned in the nondescript tunes. Above all, Carroll saw the adult world through a child's eyes, that is, as a theater of the absurd. The logic of that world is seen as illogic...
...when it is good, Lulu is as good as anything the Rep has yet put on. The staging is continuously engaging and visually interesting, the technical effects are never gratuitous, and always surprising; throughout, there's a contagious joy in theatre, a constant thread of spieltrieb, of play and wit and imagination. For example, there's the spontaneous appearance in the first half of a rock band, led by the preternaturally cool Steve Drury, on a podium that rises out of the stage. They are having fun, and the fun draws us in, which is showmanship of the first order...
...Gruault don't question Laborit's rectitude for a second; their film is not so much a work of art as it is a compilation and inter-mingling of case studies orchestrated to fit precisely into the doctor's insightful but rather rigid scheme of things. Mon Oncle exudes wit and originality and Laborit's analyses are fascinating, but the tone of the film--as dry and cool as a psychology text-book--makes it disappointing...
...writing a "cottage-industry" employment, and the result is what you would expect from a tireless home craftsman. Winter Brothers is well-conceived and well-crafted. Every piece is carefully set in its proper position, the seams lovingly shaved smooth, every link subtly interconnected to the larger piece. The wit is quiet, the words understated and nuanced, homely yet precise and evocative. Intrigued, you may soon want to stay up late with the retiring, lumberjack-shirted fellow thumbing through browned pages in his patient, archivist's enthusiasm, joining him and Swan as another "winter brother...
That was only the beginning. When Ross died and was succeeded by Shawn in 1952, other lengthy reports, some of them prescient, began to appear: Rachel Carson documenting environmental destruction, James Baldwin warning whites of The Fire Next Time. No longer resounding with gaiety and wit, The New Yorker had become a serious magazine with cartoons. For a time, in its outrage over Viet Nam and Nixon, The New Yorker abandoned ironical urbanity and bared its anger. Older readers protested not only the opinions but the shrillness, and for the first time the magazine's circulation fell...