Word: comically
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...some 30 songs, he does what only he can do. He brings to life the almost forgotten spirit of the Parisian music hall, still vital, vibrant and surging with what he calls l'électricité. Singing all but one of his numbers in French, he ranges from comic routines to nostalgic set pieces, from songs of social protest to romantic ballads as sharp and bittersweet as anisette...
Lapine is a skillful sight gagster. His staging of the Pyramus and Thisbe play-within-the-play is a little masterpiece of smartly timed slapstick. And having his quartet of young lovers lose bits and pieces of their costumes in their befuddled woodland wanderings is an apt comic comment on the larger losses of sexually addled adolescence. Among them, Christine Baranski turns Helena into that most endearing of creatures, a beautiful woman humanized by near terminal klutziness...
...earlier America and what a TV variety show often still is: a potpourri of songs, sketches and buffoonery so good-naturedly crude that it becomes accepted as the quintessential wholesome family entertainment. Few in England remember music hall; in America, even fewer have heard anything beyond the comic ditties that used to serve to round out the hour on PBS after episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs. Yet with the passion of theater people for unearthing every oddment of stage history, an off-Broadway team has assembled Charlotte Sweet, an ingratiating pastiche that re-creates typical music hall turns and simultaneously concocts...
DIED. Ernie Bushmiller, 76, cartoonist who for half a century turned out his daily comic strip Nancy, now syndicated in more than 600 newspapers; of a heart attack; in Stamford, Conn. He turned to cartoons featuring the simply drawn, beady-eyed Nancy, Sluggo and Aunt Fritzi after concluding that he had less talent than his fellow art students...
...trouble is that Graves' zeal to overcome glass-box monotony has led him into the increasingly popular, mystic fantasy world that is populated by Tolkien's hobbits, Dungeons & Dragons, sundry comic-strip characters, and the likes of the rubbery movie star E.T. It is a world that is almost beyond beauty or ugliness; almost, because the Portland Building is ugly. Unfortunately, Graves' irrational games have electrified architecture students everywhere, and they are now imitating him. He has become their Pied Piper...