Word: comically
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...surprise of the evening is Von Heute auf Morgen (From Today Until To morrow), a one-act comic opera being given its U.S. stage premiere. Schoenberg had consolidated his epochal twelve-tone system by 1923, supplanting the traditional seven-note scale with all twelve chromatic tones, which, in various intricate arrangements, became a new basis for melody and harmony. Von Heute, composed in 1929, qualifies as the first twelve-tone opera. It shows off the range of effects that are possible within such a seemingly rigid system: singable lines, comic punctuation in the orchestra, a brief pastiche of Italian lyricism...
...Hitchcock's Psycho. There are two shower sequences, and a murder in an elevator--which is pretty much like a shower--and a number of clever, knowing spoofs, but most of the Hitchcock parallels, if you care to match them up, are distractingly imprecise, like blotchy coloring in a comic strip, and taken together they hardly compose an adequate story. The picture runs on the suspense inherent in the situation--Who is the killer? When will he strike next?--but it doesn't really go anywhere, and the whole production seems merely derivative and muddled, flashy strictly in spots...
...rich variety of nonsense is for Lange, Curtin and Saint James to stage a heist. They decide to make off with the day's receipts of a shopping center, which are being displayed in a huge plastic ball as a promotional stunt. There are reasonable suspense and good comic effect as the three nice women stumblingly rehearse, plan and execute the robbery. The strategy is to attack while witnesses are distracted by a goofy historical pageant about Oregon, where - refreshingly - the film was shot. The high point of that history, the socko ending toward which the pageant builds...
...sensitive, humane poet, a comic novelist, a children's fabulist and an exuberant spirit, Randall Jarrell was the terror of his fellow writers when he sat down to review them. He once said of Oscar Williams' poems that they appeared to have been "written on a typewriter by a typewriter." He complained of Kenneth Patchen's heavyhandedness by saying, "When Mr. Patchen hints, the pigs run in from miles around." He described the neo-Victorian poets Leonard Bacon and Witter Bynner as "traditional in the sense that an index is traditional; they are the remains of something...
...weeks of his life are run-on reminders of his inferiority. No luck. No chance. And of course-as a connoisseur of the hairsbreadth art of stand-up comedy will tell you-no respect. These components of Rodney Dangerfield's fractured comic mask form one of the unlikeliest success stories around. Dangerfield was a has-been even before he was anyone at all. "I dropped out of show business once," he often confesses in his act. "But nobody noticed...