Word: witness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...that redubs Tommy Tune's somber, doomy Grand Hotel as Grim Hotel. Or a patter song to the tune of Brush Up Your Shakespeare, in which I Hate Hamlet star Nicol Williamson celebrates the joys of humbling his co-stars. This sort of humor -- a cunning blend of insiderish wit and broad clowning -- has made Forbidden Broadway an institution. Since 1982 it has played off-Broadway, enjoying the goodwill and legal cooperation of the very creators it spoofs, and has spawned a national tour and satellite troupes from Los Angeles to London. In the new, eighth edition, everyone shines. Susanne...
...sense, Limbaugh is only the latest and most extreme in a line of right-wing savants, from William F. Buckley Jr. to William Safire to Patrick Buchanan to P.J. O'Rourke, whose Manichaean world view and scathing wit make them livelier pundits than anyone in the gray liberal establishment. But he is also, and mainly, an old-fashioned radio spellbinder in the seductive Midwestern tradition of Jean Shepherd, Ken Nordine and Garrison Keillor. "Rush utilizes the medium better than any talk-show host I have ever heard," says veteran comedy writer Ken Levine, who with his partner David Isaacs...
Bleary-eyed loyalty is nothing new to Allis, though. Colleagues know Sam best for his engaging wit and his tendency to immerse himself in a good story. While on the presidential campaign trail with Walter Mondale in 1984, Allis grew a beard, overate on the campaign plane and "became somewhat Orson Wellesian," recalls a comrade. In other phases, he's been lean and mean. "Sam is indefatigable, and his enthusiasms are boundless," observes George Russell, who edited this week's cover package. "He throws himself at things. That's one of the reasons he's so good at what...
Loesser's output as a Hollywood songwriter, in the years before the composer-lyricist-librettist ganged up on Broadway, needs no revival. It already ornaments every TV late show. Loesser's catchy titles and skewed wit helped lodge many a song in the musical muscle memory of anyone who loves vintage pop: Heart and Soul and Two Sleepy People (music by Hoagy Carmichael), I Don't Want to Walk Without You (Jule Styne), Jingle Jangle Jingle (Joseph Lilley), Hoop-Dee-Doo (Milton DeLugg). And when Loesser began marrying his own music to his words, he hatched even more smashes: What...
...parade. The ballads If I Were a Bell and I've Never Been in Love Before and the up- tempo Fugue for Tinhorns and A Bushel and a Peck distinguish any musical. But the savor of Guys and Dolls is in Loesser's capturing of the Damon Runyon Broadway wit, and by extension the unique pizazz of big-town America. No one had put a medical dictionary to music and turned it into a declaration of psychosomatic desperation, as in the nonpareil Adelaide's Lament. Nobody ever heard a love plaint like Nathan Detroit's: "All right already...