Word: witting
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NOEL COWARD'S WORLD is a preppy paradise, in which the black evening gowns and white dinner jackets seem to have a life of their own. The collectibles sprinkled around the room exude rechereche. The omnipresent martinis are dry, and the wit drier still. Throughout, the predominant emotion is a practiced bitchiness. "Elvira is about as trusting as a puff adder," Ruth tells Charles. The mousse at dinner "looked a bit hysterical, but it tasted delightful," Charles tells Ruth. Why any of them puts up with the others no one seems to know...
BROWN'S UNDERLYING INNOVATION is simple but endlessly affecting: She has treated Gilbert's characters as complex, believable, human beings--not the wit-spouting, blissed-out caricatures that have appealed to audiences for more than a century. The female chorus that sings the opening number--a song about their collective love for two gondoliers--is not the usual band of cheerful automotons: they are genuinely smitten, languishing distractedly about the stage and staring into the air. When the inevitable pairing off of male and female choruses takes place, it is no hand-holding affair--they behave...
...official proponents to pleading feebly that the supply-side program needs to be given a chance. But in a timely and trenchant new book. Greed Is Not Enough: Reaganomics. CCNY economist Robert Lekachman slows that the Presidents program has already done harm enough to the American economy. With devastating wit and pungency. Lekachman provides a handbook of common sense and technical arguments to bolster the faith of anyone who has sensed all along that Reagan is crazy...
DEATHTRAP BEGS to be compared to Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth, another closed-room, twist-filled thriller, and unquestionably loses out in the comparison. But with intricate plot twists (which unfortunately tend to fizzle toward the end), and some snappy dialogue, it makes a fair attempt at matching the wit and elegance of Shaffer's play. Tendorp, the psychic, adds a nice comic touch by dropping by to see Sidney at all the wrong times, and prophesying ominously about a dangerous playwright named "Smith-Collona." Cannon is suitably daffy as the gushing Myra, and Reeve is, well, a hunk. Caine...
...HARD to believe that the South of William Faulkner. Gone With the Wind and the Ku Klux Klan could produce Rita Mac Brown. In her latest novel. Southern Discomfort--which is filled with her signature wit and warmth--Brown follows several of Motgomery. Alabama's more interesting citizens as they wander through a sexual and social labyrinth as only a candid, radical feminist...