Word: witness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...could bemoan the loss of a man who is smart and ambitious enough to be President, a man who could only fall prey to his slight stature, his high-pitched voice, and a deadpan wit that would make him the hit of a Harvard party but an ass in Austin...
...factor." If Coach Edwards' brilliance is the passing game, his wisdom is treating as assets what the previous coaches in all the bleak years before 1972 considered liabilities, including snowfalls. One of 14 children who farmed the ground near where the stadium stands now, Edwards is a wit who pretends to have hay in his hair. "We come to town with a ten-dollar bill in one pocket and the Ten Commandments in the other," he says. "And we don't break either...
More's writing expressed the agonized self-contradiction of an up-to-date careerist pursued by ancient demons. Marius rates him as "the greatest English storyteller between Chaucer and Shakespeare." The wit and irony that would soon mark the best Elizabethan playwrights already distinguished More. Like his friend Erasmus, More revered classical Greece. His masterpiece, Utopia (1516), a fantasy of the ideal commonwealth, imagined human beings so perfectly ruled by logic that they were happy to own no property and to labor modestly and endlessly for the common good...
MORE CRITICAL to the play's success, however, are the lively and powerful performances of the other members of the cast, who work both individually and as a troupe to keep the audience laughing throughout. As the fool Osino, Gary Armagnac blends just the right amount of wit and wisdom to successfully mock love and the gentrified aristocracy. Jack Aranson (Sir Toby Belch) and Francis Cuka (Maria) also provide the play with some of its most amusing--and bawdy--humor in their defiance of courtly propriety. And by far the most hilarious performance of the evening is Joseph Costa...
...This is not the customary sugarplum rendition. As the artist points out in his introduction, the Christmastime ballet was based on a version of the tale by Alexandre Dumas, "smoothed out, bland and utterly devoid of the weird, dark qualities that make it something of a masterpiece." With characteristic wit and technical wizardry, Sendak has restored those qualities. Marie, journeying from childhood to the altar, old Drosselmeier the taleteller and Nutcracker himself are no longer marzipan creations. In Ralph Manheim's vigorous new translation, mice and soldiers, clowns and children speak out as never before, and Sendak has found...