Word: wordplay
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...rest is all more of what Cheever has done well for years. His Sentences remain gently illuminated gems of language, uncomplicated by any wordplay and unfailingly rhythmic. He controls the pace masterfully, whether guiding the action over a cascade of toxic wastes or through a freshet of afternoon passion. And he can toss in a wisecrack at any moment. Running into his friend Eduardo the elevator man sometime subsequent to their tryst. Sears remarks. "We've got to find something else we can do together...Do you like to fish' Would you like to go fishing...
...devil's advocacy that such an investigation demands. The result is a book of pulled punches. The book's title comes from Stalin's famous reply, when told of the pope's likely opposition to a Soviet move: "How many divisions has the pope?" With a bit of clever wordplay, Nichols seems intent on making it mean not only the pope's military divisions, but his moral and spiritual divisions as well. Ironically, however, the divisions that the book succeeds in pointing out best are merely the author...
...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...