Rough patches in his high register marred the earnest performance of the tenor Dietmar Kerschbaum.
Mr. Culkin, playing the charming, insecure Alig, gives a brave and earnest performance, but also a desperately awkward one.
Those responses are silly, he believes, because they've become "the earnest performance of seriousness in the absence of both genuine seriousness and real laughter.... Think Keith Olbermann.
The mileage on this well-traveled masterpiece precludes anyone saying anything new about it, but the London players were involved down to their toes in an honest and deeply earnest performance.
On a more modest scale, something like this had happened on the previous mornings, too, with people, like critics after an opening night, trading notes about the stolid, earnest performance of Bill Bradley, the careful eloquence of Barbara Jordan, the banked-down fire of Jesse Jackson, and the twangy peroration of Governor Zell Miller, the new country-music star from Georgia.
Then go the other way and measure the S2000 vs. the more expensive, $40,000 Audi TT Roadster (225 horsepower convertible model), and you find the Honda's shortcomings a bit more glaring, since the TT manages both low-speed fun and reasonably earnest performance.
The overripe dialogue and earnest performances give this sugary cocktail some real fizz.
Earnest performances are evolving into choreographed spectacles with more inflatables than a Katy Perry half-time show.
It starts with a clever idea, sprinkles the storytelling with some tangy surprises (preferably just before the commercials) and unfolds through earnest performances.
But on "Best Troubador" he sounds as serious as heartbreak; the album lacks even the hint of playfulness that lurked about Haggard's most earnest performances.
Up to that point, non-Abba fans and urbane theatergoers (subsets that surely overlap) may have felt an impatience with the show's sitcom plot, earnest performances and elevator-music score.
