Word: nonpareil
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...wonderful restaurants. As a hub of international finance and society, it rivaled New York City and Paris, and it took perverse pride in its reputation, well earned by the depravity of the carnal Barbary Coast, as "the wickedest city in the world." The evening of April 17, when the nonpareil Enrico Caruso sang in Carmen at the Grand Opera House before repairing to the fabulous Palace Hotel (a telephone and bath for every room, no less), was simply the glittering usual. As the populace drifted to sleep that night, all was well. Who could have dreamed that in only...
Artistically, Williams and Martin, as comics of quicksilver intelligence and bleak vision, seem eminently suited to play Samuel Beckett's battered tramps. Oscar winner F. Murray Abraham (Amadeus) and performance artist Bill Irwin are nonpareil casting for the pompous landlord and his slavish manservant. Director Mike Nichols, a winner of eight Tony Awards, has an apt gift for seamless transitions from farce to ferocity...
...accomplishment was very nearly nonpareil. To put the grand slam of tennis in perspective, it is far rarer than either baseball's (16) or horse racing's (eleven) triple crowns. The recent demigods, Martina Navratilova, Chris Evert and Billie Jean King among them have 47 major tournament victories, but none managed that perfect dominance over their rivals and the calendar. Only four other tennis players, male and female, belong in this most exclusive of tennis clubs: Don Budge (1938), Maureen Connolly (1953), Rod Laver (1962 and 1969) and Margaret Court (1970). On Saturday Steffi Graf of West Germany joined that...
...inherently the least realistic branch of performed literature. Movies and TV thrive on you-are-there naturalism but typically falter when they ask audiences to see more complex layerings of space, time and memory. The screen, large or small, is the place for action. The theater is the nonpareil place for inward thought outwardly expressed. Audiences can witness recollection, reverie or fantasy -- or, as surprisingly few writers have explored, outright madness...
...transplanting does no violence to Shakespeare's intentions, although some of the erratically varying performances do. Among the high spots: Lumbly's liltingly Caribbean and muscular Oberon and Lorraine Toussaint's Titania, his equal in dignity and a nonpareil in languorous erotic indulgence. Bottom (Abraham) and his pals, the "rude mechanicals," are for once believable working men, unpatronizingly evoked if, alas, therefore a little less funny than usual. This Midsummer will not stand in memory with Peter Brook's 1971 landmark staging or Liviu Ciulei's 1985 war of the sexes. But it is a vibrant start to a welcome...