Word: wryness
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...songs - or rather those tossed out of such shows as Candide, On the Town, Wonderful Town and West Side Story - a bittersweet delight. Less than topnotch though they are, the songs brim with confidence and fun. So does the patter, which harks back to the days when sophistication meant wryness and a wise crack was communication. The cast communicates by singing and dancing, and at least two of them - Patricia Elliott and Janie Sell - should immediately have their snap and crackle popped into a real musical...
...tribute Dame Sibyl exacted from the islanders included the traditional tenth sheaf of all cereals harvested and a live chicken each year as tax on every kitchen chimney on her tenants' houses. Even so, she observed with her usual wryness, "they only give me the thinnest and oldest." Other seigneurial privileges included the right to keep bitches, forbidden to the Sarkese for fear that a proliferation of dogs might drive sheep over the island's 300-ft. cliffs into the English Channel. That noble prerogative caused one of the rare Sark rebellions against Dame Sibyl's authority...
CHRIS SMITHER--Like Rush, Chris Smither is a local boy making it good in the musical diaspora. Smither has the studied loneliness of James Taylor, but a few things Taylor lacks--wryness, variety, a voice that can sing blues. He is, in short, talented. Like many of his cohorts who established quite a folk community here some years ago, Smither is heard in the neighborhood ever more rarely--all, the more reason to see him in the congenial atmosphere of Passim...
...Millions has a bit of the wryness, a lot of closeups-and a welcome touch of humor besides. Peter Ustinov, who co-authored the script with Ira Wallach, plays Marcus Pendleton, a waddling con man with a surefire scheme" to steal millions by zonking a mammoth computer. He opens up storefront offices all over Europe and has the rigged machine send him large monthly checks. After seeding millions away all over the Continent, Marcus settles down to a life of financial bliss with his scatterbrained secretary (Maggie Smith) who imperils the whole operation by accidentally discovering large amounts of foreign...
...hanged, is all forensic and fingerpointing, but often his gestures distract from his lines, and sometimes he loses the thread of the poetry in his forced jauntiness. Nancy McDoniel, the lady accused of witchcraft, smiles and enthuses as constantly as a Dickens heroine with never a trace of the wryness and mystery in her part...