Word: comically
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After 40 years, the play still provides a delightful evening because Barry could hone a comic line like a Sheffield blade. Director Ellis Rabb does full justice to that, but he scants the social subtext of what is, in some ways, a defense of snobbery. Without carrying Brechtian placards, the play says in a variety of ways: "Marry your own kind," "Wealth sanctifies," "Avoid lesser breeds (like maids and intrusive upstart journalists) who violate the elitist code of being 'yare.' " That is the saline substance beneath the sleek surface of The Philadelphia Story, and it is only fitfully...
...sensation to be searching for comic relief in a comedy. But certain smoggy patches of Lunch Hour do tend to induce that quest. Possibly the two funniest moments in Act I are Gilda Radner sparring with a spilled pot of coffee and juggling a scalding-hot spoon, and Sam Waterston watching the page proofs of his upcoming book unreel inexorably into a goldfish tank. All of which goes to prove that Director Mike Nichols is still a playwright's best friend...
Jean Kerr's comic touch is slightly anesthetized this time out, but she has not lost it. She couldn't. That would be out of character for the author of Mary, Mary and the droll chronicler of suburban domesticity who regaled us with Please Don't Eat the Daisies and The Snake Has All the Lines. Trust her to keep a civilized, witty tongue in her head whatever her characters' antics. Lunch Hour is a tale of extramarital hanky-panky without the id. Oliver (Sam Waterston) and Nora (Susan Kellermann) have rented the upper half...
...inspector-general of the antiquities of Greece, and other experts, all of whom know how to develop a hypothesis as well as an exhibition. The installation affects a quest. It is divided among three distinct, sequential sections that draw one from room to room, back in time from Alexander comic strips and a Daumier cartoon to a final, wine-dark chamber where a wreath of gold leaves and acorns hangs over a gold larnax, or chest, in which Philip II's bones might have lain. The tomb at Vergina in which these treasures were discovered was unearthed...
...stereotypical visions of England and America. The break is a welcome one. Keith Rogal as Bernard-- the senescent and near-deaf senior officer whose droning, endless tale of a five-pound bet with Lloyd George is by far the evening's funniest sequence-- turns hesitation into a form of comic torture, and uses stock mannerisms of old age to excellent effect...