Word: comically
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ULTIMATELY it wasn't the plots, but Lucy that was the centerpiece of these shows. Lucille Ball's face has been seen by more people in the world, more often, than the face of anyone else in history, according to TV Guide's analysis. Her incredible range of comic facial expression is light years ahead of Cosby, and her innovative slapstick has influenced several subsequent generations of comedians. At last year's first annual American Comedy Awards, winners Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin both paid homage to Lucy in their acceptance speeches...
...asked gently. Then he turned her over to a colleague, former American Ballet Theater Soloist George de la Pena. "I found her to be extraordinarily intelligent," says De la Pena., "and extraordinarily shy. A lot of people look at her as being an extrovert and a bit of a comic. But I think it's a shell that hides a very soft center. Her emotional capacity is quite deep. We worked on opening...
...their destinies according to the dictates of reason and plausibility. But actually they are in thrall to hidden forces, submerged patterns, in danger of being swallowed up, say, by the plot of a gothic novel or the rigors of a Socratic dialogue. The outcome of such conflict can be comic or tragic or, when Murdoch is at her best, both. This time out, she is at her best...
...raze the family's mansion and orchard to create a cottage camp for vacationers. In place of this tragic vision of culture under attack, some Soviet productions have hailed Lopakhin as a visionary forerunner of the people's state. Either way, the play becomes didactic, and its undeniably comic moments work at the expense of its humanity...
...scale of seriousness are two works notable for their sheer larkish effrontery. In George Baxt's The Tallulah Bankhead Murder Case (St. Martin's Press; 228 pages; $15.95), the ferocious actress is joined by such other real-life viragoes as Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman. Baxt's comic turn mingles the actual and the imaginary like a pun-obsessed spin-off of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, and has a similarly political bent. Set in 1952, it sketches deft parallels between the paranoia induced by a serial killer and the mania generated by McCarthy-era blacklisting. The plot is merely serviceable...