Word: staining
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Wrong. John Updike, self-appointed myth-maker of the New York and Boston bedroom community, menacingly shakes a coffee cup and a lone sock at you and growls, "You don't have problems. You have PROBLEMS. BIG PROBLEMS. And they all MEAN SOMETHING. Every coffee stain on the dining room table, every trip to the vet for the family dog's shots, every play in the Little League baseball game. And I," Updike goes on, "am here to bore into each one with my unrelenting literary jackhammer. I will drill until I hit vast and oceanic symbolism...
Like most musicals, King of Hearts depends heavily on gimmickry and convention to cover a fairly mediocre book. The dialogue sometimes becomes frighteningly simplistic, even fatuous, and most of the "jokes" aren't too funny. But the songs, which range from standard to excellent--particularly "A Stain on the Name" and "Nothing, Only Love"--and the many dance numbers make the show. Field's choreography, although not original, is effective, helped along by several excellent dancers...
...never so much out of conviction as out of a shrugging sense that if you have to go about the tiresome business of living, you might as well do it with honor. They try praying it out, sinning it out, killing, conspiring and spying it out. But that stain of pessimism and moral fatigue never comes out in the wash. (Not to mention the revolution...
...which can match any slum in the world for terrible conditions. Bush-wick--block after block of burned-out buildings and garbage-filled empty lots--looks like a city bombed to rubble in World War Two. East New York, Oceanhill-Brownsville, Bedford-Stuyvesant and other ghettoes are a dark stain on the pages of our society. How can such deprivation exist among general affluence...
...only conceivable stain on Keenan's record is the postion he has held since September 1975 on the Board of Governors of Reza Shah Kabir University, the national university of Iran at Teheran, but Keenan said Monday he will drop that position if it conflicts with his work at the GSAS...