Word: portrays
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Candide is an enormous and exhausting show. The score, which contains a couple dozen numbers, frequently demands operatic voices; the chorus of twenty-odd people change costumes roughly five times apiece to portray seventy-eight characters. The most demanding role is that of the narrator-ringmaster, who appears in five different guises, including Voltaire himself. Some of actor William Falk's lines had to be recorded to allow him time to race around the stage and transform himself into another character. Falk seems to be able to handle the various singing styles and characterizations, but the costume changes at times...
...central failure in the production is Steven Aveson's Proteus. Saddled with a part that is admittedly difficult to portray convincingly, Aveson capitulates and portrays almost no character at all. He stands around with his chest thrust out and his eyes fixed on the overhead lights, looking like a linebacker at a frat party. He delivers his speeches with hardly any grasp of the emotional contradictions that torment Proteus and can only smile dumbly and bounce on his toes, as he does in the climactic scene at the end, to show that his character is disturbed...
...China Syndrome is not a disaster film in the style of The Towering Inferno nor Earthquake--it doesn't even rely on ritual seduction scenes to cement the plot. Lemmon and Fonda portray characters who are average people, holding perhaps better-than-average jobs, who act heroically when the circumstances demand it. Fonda is very believable as a success-oriented member of the "Me Generation," at first frustrated far more by her boss's fluffy conception of her than by his cover-up of her nuclear accident story. "I've got a pretty good job, and I fully intend...
...possible that the citizens of San Francisco do not need their consciousness raised about the perils of venereal disease, but just in case, a Marin County artist named Grant Monday last week unveiled in Union Square a 4-ft. by 3-ft. ice sculpture that was supposed to portray a gonorrhea germ 700,000 times larger than life. By midweek, happily, the sculpture had been transformed into a puddle...
...Eugene McCarthy, 62, and Political Columnist James Kilpatrick, 58, began one evening to catalogue the bureaucratic monsters they often encountered: "Mr. Kilpatrick recalled the Budgetary Shortfall he had seen along the Potomac. Mr. McCarthy spoke fondly of Leaping Qantums." They roused Political Cartoonist Jeff MacNelly out of bed to portray their creatures, and the result was A Political Bestiary (McGraw-Hill...