To foster an artificial populism downtown -- to defer in advance to programming with the broadest public appeal -- is to underestimate the public and underestimate the capacity for audience-building that a move like this might engender for any institution, including City Opera itself.
The stories are great, and Cook's impressive capacity for inspired audience banter (away from these solo gigs, he's one of the best comperes around) make for a fast-moving, entertaining evening.
His comedies, which express the values and predilections of bourgeois society and praise the virtues of commerce and family life, were intended to appeal to the material aspirations of a middle-class audience whose capacity for idealism was limited.
I tell them to stop worrying about theories of theatre, and just think about Brecht's belief that drama can arouse and enhance an audience's capacity for action.
Whereas Bryan Cranston's meth-cooking, murder-happy chemistry teacher, Walter White, was terrifying to watch, Paul's role as Jesse Pinkman Whitete's partner in crime, and a man progressively broken season by season – tested the audience's capacity for empathy to its limits.
A musical event called "1969," which the group presented for a capacity audience at Zankel Hall on Thursday night, had all those qualities and more.
"Harold prayed and praised with his feet," the Rev. Canon Robert Wright said in welcoming remarks to the capacity audience for the tribute, which was produced by Rigmor Newman Nicholas, the dancer's widow, and Bruce Goldstein.
But the first set on Tuesday, played for a capacity audience, was a textbook example of how free improvisation can provide common ground for musicians of wildly disparate styles and temperaments.
Such tales might sound apocryphal – though Kemp swears they are true – but what is inarguable is that from an early age he had to develop a capacity for winning over potentially hostile audiences.
It's a witty, warm-hearted and emotionally eloquent account of the play that makes the most of the Globe's matchless capacity for a buoyant rapport with the audience.
Especially now that every other aspiring troll has a platform, an audience, an infinite capacity for self-abasement, and a dream.
