Word: comically
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...addition of the multi-talented Sara Lee hurray for coeducation in rock!) The biting "The History of the World" is a disguised condemnation of imperialism and the album's underdog success. "When I was in my mother's womb, social structure seemed at simple thing," sings King with comic earnestness...
Allen did try-eight times, from Play It Again Sam to Manhattan-to the kind of crescendoing acclaim that might sound monotonous to an ambitious artist. Like Chaplin after The Great Dictator, Allen may have felt he had outgrown both the comic character he created and inhabited and the kind of movie his audience expected of him. And so Allen has pulled his persona out of shape, stretching the sad-clown face to accommodate loftier musings. In reaction, moviegoers have pulled back: a Woody Allen movie is not the purring money machine it used...
...Dolly Parton). One has never seen him so glumly tentative in a role. Parton plays Mona as if Mae West had been cryonically preserved but someone didn't quite finish the job of unfreezing her while restoring her to life. What is mostly missing is a sense of comic authority. Parton has interpolated a couple of her plaintive country songs, which do not fit the brassy Broadway banalities of Carol Hall's basic score. On the other hand, as is generally the case when shows are restaged in a realistic movie context, the original numbers do not work...
...Shakespeare's. With in its emotional universe are found heroic legends and pathetic domestic tragedies, as well as broad comic treatments of such eternal human vagaries as drunkenness and adultery. Immediately accessible on the level of mime, it is nevertheless highly sophisticated, yielding its ultimate secrets- and thus pleasures- to those who have taken the time to study it. Its name once connoted "outlandish" or "eccentric," yet it literally means song-dance-skill. It is Kabuki...
...evolved, with men known as onna-gata performing the female roles, Kabuki became more explicitly theatrical, drawing on the earlier dramatic conventions of serious Noh theater, comic Kyogen plays, and stories from the Bunraku puppet theater. Parts were passed down the generations as leading theatrical families established themselves. Today, when a Kabuki actor reaches a sufficient level of artistry, he is rewarded with the name of a distinguished ancestor. Leading Kabuki artists like Tamasaburo, 32, a brilliant onnagata, may achieve the popularity of rock stars. One of the most effective works in the tour repertory is Narukami (The Thunder...