Word: comically
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...night of a lifetime-five lifetimes, to be more precise. Said an awed Danny Kaye: "You get to the top and just before you start down you know that that is the very top of where you are going." Comic Actor Kaye, 71, shared the pinnacle moment last week in Washington with Singer Lena Home, 67, Opera Composer Gian Carlo Menotti, 73, Playwright Arthur Miller, 69, and Violinist Isaac Stern, 64. The quintet were receiving this year's Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime achievement in the arts. They join a select company of only 30 other recipients...
...hipster for whom anarchy is both a way of life and an investigative technique. Were Eddie Murphy absent from this movie one might decry its ambling and the failure of writer and director to develop out of a fertile premise either a well-twisted mystery or some truly wild comic turns. But Murphy is very much present, and it could be argued that their task was not so much to provide a taut story line as to create a cheerful climate where his marvelous talent and his compelling yet gracefully stated energy could sprout in all directions...
...singers, as is freshman Steve Lyne whose lead in "We Beseech Thee," where the cast finally does come together, makes the song one of the strongest numbers in the show. Nick Weir, Margery Trumble, and senior David Schanzer (appearing in his first Harvard production) deserve kudos for sharp comic timing and expression...
...book's setting is Chicago in the 1930s, an era of celebrity gangsters, ruined financiers, penniless immigrants, left-leaning intellectuals and psychotic anarchists, all of them interconnected in Von Hoffman's ruefully comic invention. The period is as rich and varied as the turn-of-the-century New York City of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, and the range of real-life characters is even greater: Hoodlums Al Capone and Frank Nitti and Machine Gun Jack McGurn, Mayors Big Bill Thompson and Anton Cermak, Roman Catholic Cardinal George Mundelein, Utilities Tycoon Samuel Insull and Assassin Giuseppe Zangara...
...Hoffman's large cast and its machinations remain credible and, even in the comic passages, are never overdrawn. But the author is more than an adroit tale spinner; it is character, not accident or circumstance, that brings his central figures to grief. In the process, he merges Chicago myth, legend and history with poignant private truth. This journalist, at least, had not only a novel but a genuine novelist...