Word: wordplay
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...happens when the cast is singing and dancing the show's centerpiece. "A Pair O' Lips Now," a silly play on Coppola's Vietnam epitaph A pair o' lips now...Apocalypse Now...obviously it has something to do with war. And lips. And music. The ideas spin off the wordplay like sparks: World War Two, our last celebrational war: a U.S.O. troupe, those impetuous combat comedians: lips, something to do with lips. One suspects the pun came first and the show followed--something like falling down the stairs...
...cussedness" we get plenty--a freewheeling assortment of burlesque gags and visual stunts. Wood grew up in the world of British music halls, and the influence appears in his predilection for puns, wordplay, and sexual humor (men in drag and a woman, Mary Jane Pendejo--played by Karen MacDonald--as Major Trumbull). This is wonderful entertainment, but it's going nowhere; Wood's view of moviedom--war as a ribald chaos prevents the play from establishing any dramatic focus or momentum, and the act lapses into a number of extraneous routines. It remains a wild burlesque with some high points...
...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 by a child, and its arbitrary...
...Spectator. He is a rugged, independent Christian humanist who confronts an age that has depersonalized and secularized his values. Such novels as The Doctor Is Sick, Devil of a State and A Clockwork Orange are not only cautionary satires but examples of Burgess's flair for Joycean wordplay and knack for turning out novels that entertain as well as instruct...
...peculiarly British obsession with both perpetrating and denouncing scandalous activity, the play poses special difficulties for American performers. The Winthrop cast meets its challenge with modest skill, and no pretense of doing anything more than presenting a funny play. The script plasters over its mediocre theme with superficially brilliant wordplay; the director and cast make the best of it by paying the theme as little attention as possible and playing the verbal trickery for all it's worth...