Word: pointillist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...scene at Olympic stadium was like a pointillist tableau. Huge white parasols rested on the green infield, ready to shield athletes from the autumn sun. White doves left over from the opening ceremony strutted on the grass while athletes stretched languidly. Then a Korean in white blazer and gloves climbed up a ladder and fired a pistol. The points began to blur: legs pumped, iron heaved skyward, bodies shot forward...
Sondheim's intellectuality is reflected in his choice of subjects, far weightier than the heft of the average straight play on Broadway, let alone the merry moonshine of past musicals: the birth of pointillist painting (Sunday in the Park); Commodore Perry's opening of Japan to the West (Pacific Overtures, 1977); a murderous barber with a Marxist-sounding class grievance and a woman companion who cooks his victims in pies (Sweeney Todd, 1979); the impossibility of marriage (Company, 1970); and the decline of the chorus-girl kick line as a metaphor for the loss of American innocence (Follies, 1971). Like...
...birth of pointillist painting. Commodore Perry's opening of Japan to the West. A murderous barber and his woman companion who cooks the victims in pies. A bitter show-biz story of financial rise and moral fall--told chronologically backwards. The ruin of marriages. The disappointments of infidelity. The decline of the chorus-girl kick line as a metaphor for the loss of American innocence...
...Astaire could get a thrill just from being caught in the rain with Ginger Rogers. Gene Kelly shouted, "Gotta dance!" as if it were a battle cry or a mating call. But those carefree days seem as distant as Ike and Mamie; musicals have more serious topics--Argentine dictators, pointillist painters--weighing on their souls. Musicals used to be called, oh, High Spirits. Now London's hot song-and-dance show is Les Miserables, which locals translate as The Glums. That is precisely the disease afflicting the modern musical. Artistic ambition and a social conscience are all very fine...
...Milbank's Couture fills a real need. Very little of substance has been written about couturiers. Most of the best commentary on their work is squirreled away in novels: Proust's chronicling of the shift from Belle Epoque bustles to the more natural silhouette, Fitzgerald's and Waugh's pointillist evocations of '30s glamour, Mary McCarthy's accurate, often satiric eye for all feminine strategies...