Gray was a dutiful, earnest little man who taught Sunday school and sang in his local Elks lodge choir, but he also belonged to the Club of Corset Salesmen of the Empire State and away from home was a stylish, likably urbane seller of lingerie, with an acute thirst for bootleg whiskey.
In the vernal "Symphonic Variations," Ashton's great neo-Classical ballet to César Franck's music, all performed dutifully with little projection.
But, if the compliments to the mother may seem a little dutiful, those directed towards the child come across as spontaneous and genuine.
But in David Priestland's The Red Flag you will only find a dutiful chronicle, with little explanation, apart from some dubious suggestions that whatever happened happened because of the background, mood or impulses of the leaders.
All this has been widely, if a little dutifully, deplored.
As the girl dutifully aims her little camera, her father advises the lion, "Say antelope".
Some of the excerpts (like the Last Supper scene from Matthew 26) feel dutifully included, with little added by the dramatizations by Barbara Bosch, who also conceived the show.
They also seemed tonally dull, a little dutifully repressed, unequal to any young artist's urgent wish to make an art that he might call his own.
The morning's victory parade had been endearingly lackluster, as the marchers -- soldiers, students, stevedores, gymnasts, bank tellers, doctors with their stethoscopes -- chatted and laughed together as they dutifully waved their little red flags.
