Word: comically
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...PARADE, a ton of beauty. I am fat and I am proud of it," crows Francine, the 350-pound Roman goddess of plump pulchritude in Alber Innaurato's Passione. Sex and food figure in prominently with the play's comic themes, as they did in Innaurato's highly successful Broadway production Gemini. But where the tasty humor and the social statement complemented each other will in Gemini in passione they form a somewhat less savory mixture. The bittersweet flavor Innaurato aims for is drowned in cloying source of sugary high-energy fun and the salty tears of a misplaced tugging...
...play opens with great promise, building the comic intensity will through the first act. The small theatre is tucked away in the basement of an Italian restaurant, and with intrepid imagination in set design, we easily believe that we are sitting in a seedy but bright, lower class North End apartment. From the crowded clotheslines hanging across the theatre to the peeling paint on the dingy walls to the dirty linoleum floor, the intimate theatre-in-the round atmosphere brings us completely into Berto's apartment...
...writing partner ever sniveled so stereophonically as Lennon as he serenades his flower princess. Ono does display a neat flash of wit in her final song: "In the world's eye/ We were Laurel and Hardy/ In our minds/ We were Heathcliff and Cathy." But hagiography, even half comic, like this, should be resisted. Sentiment might make that hard. But Milk and Honey makes it a cinch. -By Jay Cocks
...comic havoc of Noises Off means peril at every step for the actors. Says Garber, who somersaults down a flight of stairs into a pratfall every night: "I still say a little prayer each time I begin...
...trouble is that people simply will not disappear. There is too much stubbornness in them, too great a propensity for self-assertion. Langston Hughes' comic character, Jesse B. Semple (known as Simple in Hughes' newspaper column), once boasted that he had been "cut, stabbed, run over, hit by a car, tromped by a horse, robbed, fooled, deceived, doublecrossed, dealt seconds . . . but I am still here." Not even death weakens such a stand. The power of ghosts is that they manage to retain their place in the world in spite of the final obstruction; they insist on their presence...