Word: wordplay
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...started as a form of verbal jousting--good-natured wordplay. Gangsta rap, with its themes of low riding and thuggery, raised the stakes. Now, a record-label president says, "a lot of the people who are the new players are coming from the drug trade or gang-related backgrounds. I myself have had death threats...
...production's success begins, as one would expect, with Catherine Ingman's stage direction. A constant, careful and oftentimes outrageous choreography of cast members supplements the humor of the script. Sir William Schwenck Gilbert's wit is very much couched in wordplay and innuendo, and Ingman creates--in effeminate prancing, mock-stealthy stalking and slapstick combat--a physical counterpart to the clever turns of phrases. While such physical comedy can compromise itself with too much zeal or too little precision, this seldom happens. The actors seem to understand the appropriate bounds for their movements and the script is never upstaged...
...schizophrenic, to be exact--but it's a nice mad, not angry or morose. In a spray of wildly allusive wordplay, David Helfgott natters compulsively, cheerfully, to himself. Popular cinema loves head cases, especially when their condition is as endearing as David's. Because he was once a pianist of great promise, and because his is a true story, Helfgott is an ideal vessel for the awe and pity of the middle-class moviegoer in search of an elevating experience. Shine, an entertaining, way-too-canny Australian film written by Jan Sardi and directed by Scott Hicks, encourages a kind...
...Houston Grand Opera gives new life to Thomson's hothouse flower. The production, which runs through the end of this week and will be seen this summer at the new Lincoln Center Festival in New York City, is the perfect marriage of director and subject. Stein's wordplay and Thomson's homespun music are direct antecedents of such minimalist classics as Wilson's 1969 The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud and the 1976 Wilson--Philip Glass opera Einstein on the Beach...
VLADIMIR NABOKOV DIED IN 1977 to mixed reviews. Not everyone was captivated by his erudition, multilingual wordplay and narrative frolics. But those who tuned to his wavelength came to appreciate that the style and gamesmanship so intimidating to his competition disguised the author's larger task: to heighten the pleasures of the natural world and the gratifications of personal creativity...