Word: wonderments
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Smoke 'em if you've got 'em" was the Army's traditional way of announcing a break for soldiers -- and it is no wonder that 52% of G.I.s smoke tobacco. Last week the newly health-conscious Army implemented a policy to stub out that hoary tradition. In a move assailed as "unjustified, unenforceable and unfortunate" by the Tobacco Institute, the service banned smoking in conference rooms, auditoriums, classrooms, all Army vehicles and at all times during basic training...
...skittishness seem almost operatically prescient. Today the moment-by-moment potential for nuclear war supplies the apocalyptic undercurrent. In both eras, the ambitions of architects and artists seem rather diminished, their work purely picturesque or else merely solipsistic. Now as then, people dress beautifully, live elegantly, party madly, and wonder with a sly smile about the end of the world...
...plot takes a few predictable and a few less predictable turns, we aren't left to wonder much longer. But no hints here. The performances, especially from the up to now singularly untalented Lowe, merit a trip to Boston to see for yourself...
...initial wonder of the show is that unlike most adaptations, David Edgar's script does not merely excerpt Charles Dickens' 800-page novel about greed vs. decency in Victorian London: virtually all of it is there, twists and turns, guffaws and grief, more than 130 characters wearing some 375 costumes and 75 wigs. Yet the epic sweep almost never overwhelms the emotional intimacy. Good ultimately triumphs in each of the half a dozen interwoven plots, but the show ends with the now wealthy title character carrying an abandoned boy--a symbol of the hapless children whom Nicholas frees from...
...pathos in a whore's hauteur. As the gang lord, Michael Caine exudes satiny menace. And Director Neil Jordan (who wrote the + script with David Leland) tells the story from George's point of view while filming it in a style as fancy and knowing as Simone's. No wonder audiences have taken to this gritty romance as to a mongrel puppy; for at heart Mona Lisa is an old-fashioned poor-soul weepie, and George is less a Cagney rakehell than a Chaplin tramp. Ever clever, though, Jordan massages the viewer's sentimentality like Simone servicing a dim, fond...