Word: comically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...upside, the director has discovered a comic sensibility of excess that could hold the seeds of a brilliant production. Kilty litters the stage with throwaways, sight gags (a very prominent Cherub's phallus is put to some inventive uses), and blatant two-dimensional parodies. Two pedants, Holofernes (Jeremy Geidt) and Sir Nathanid (Harry S. Murphy), converse while playing a hilariously dishonest game of croquet; the clownish Constable Dull (John Bottoms) runs his bike into a hedge; the Queen of France enters in a '37 Cadillac (What is behind the ART's fascination with getting vehicles on stage?). Most attempts...
Because he is English and revels in satire, Boyd has often been compared to Evelyn Waugh. The comparison does not really work; he has neither Waugh's masterly style nor his free-floating malice. Also, when Waugh wrote his comic gems in the '20s and '30s, it was still possible to have a truly innocent hero, like Paul Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall or William Boot in Scoop. A dark half-century later, Boyd's Henderson Dores would not be believable as a pure man; he must be inept and pusillanimous. When last seen, he has lost...
Allende is not just an epigone of Garcia Marquez. Writing in the tradition of Latin America's magic realists, she has a singular talent for producing full- scale representational portraits with comic surreal touches. Her rendering of the Trueba patriarch Esteban and his wife Clara is a hilarious display of mismatching. While the crude, commonsensical Esteban is doomed by nature to cause constant offense to his wife, Clara the Clairvoyant irritates her spouse by her perpetual whispered concourse with the spirits...
DIED. Chester Gould, 84, cartoonist who in 1931 created Dick Tracy, the hawk- nosed dean of comic-strip detectives, and chronicled his adventures, syndicated in more than 500 newspapers, until retiring in 1977; in Woodstock, Ill. Gould drew his original inspiration from Prohibition-era gangsterism and the new folk heroes of law enforcement: J. Edgar Hoover's G-men. Gould's wonderfully nasty, physiognomically named villains--Flattop, the Mole, Pruneface, the Brow--never got the better of his snap-brimmed hero...
David Wingrove adeptly integrates the comic play within the Bliss family with the comic play on the stage; but then again, Hayfever is a play that could almost direct itself. There were only a few times when the actors made unnatural motions while falling into theatrical tableaus...