Word: comically
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Woody Allen rounds up the usual show-biz subjects -- egomaniacal star (Dianne Wiest in a great, bold comic performance), earnest young playwright, desperate producer -- and an underworld hit man (Chazz Palminteri) who has what none of them has: theatrical genius. He teaches them all a thing or two about art and life in Allen's happiest, most assured comedy in many years...
However, Sebastian Conley crossed the line in his comic strip "Seth Lives" when he portrayed former president Ronald Reagan as forgetting his lines at the re-naming ceremonies of North House (Editorial Cartoon, Opinion Page, Dec. 12). The character Seth leaned into the frame and informed Reagan. "That's Pforzheimer House, not Alzheimer's House...
...MASH was to war movies, Nashville to country music, A Wedding to the middle-class family, H.E.A.L.T.H. to the organic-food business and The Player to Hollywood, so is Ready to Wear to fashion: a comic panorama of people pretending to get along under stress, creating a bogus community, playing games of power and privilege, establishing who's boss. The tone of an Altman film -- the desperate milling, the sense of isolation within a crowd, the urgency to no clear end -- is the reflection of life on any movie set and, indeed, in the working lives of most people. When...
...costume designer William Ivey Long, choreographer Susan Stroman and lyricist Lynn Ahrens. Some are working at half speed. Menken's melodies are less inventive than his scores for the Disney cartoons The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. He gets a B+ for hummable ballads and ho-humbuggable comic turns. Stroman's jazziest ideas are reprises of her dancing-on-furniture number from Crazy for You. Ahrens' lyrics are wan, snapless. It takes a while for the 90-min. show to become more than the sum of its parts...
...face value. The performances are therefore far nimbler than is typical, but such is the virtuosity of Gardiner's 60-piece orchestra that the music never seems rushed or scrambled. Listen, for example, to the famous finale of the Ninth / Symphony. The "Turkish march" usually sounds like an inappropriately comic intrusion in an otherwise profound movement. Gardiner takes the passage nearly twice as fast as most other conductors do, and as a result it sounds fitting, a natural outgrowth of the period's fascination with martial Janissary music...