On the other hand, numbers in which the characters complain about the unsatisfying futures that await them ("Are you a man or just the plan your parents made?") have a pasted-on, perfunctory topicality.
Tears fill Georges's eyes, and ours, too, as we realize that his great sadness as a parent is not that his son is straight — there are a couple of perfunctory jokes on that subject — but that his son is conventional, and sort of mean in his conventionality: hasn't Georges raised him not only to tolerate difference but to be oblivious of it?
Tears fill Georges's eyes, and ours, too, as we realize that his great sadness as a parent is not that his son is straight there are a couple of perfunctory jokes on that subject but that his son is conventional, and sort of mean in his conventionality: hasn't Georges raised him not only to tolerate difference but to be oblivious of it?
As this re-framing of the genre took place, the music took on a newly perfunctory status.
As this re-framing of the genre took place, the music took on a new perfunctory status.
There were cameos in K'Naan's set too: by Nas, on a perfunctory but still galvanizing version of his classic "New York State of Mind," and Damian Marley, on one of K'Naan's grittier pieces, "I Come Prepared".
He quickly gave up on his perfunctory attempt, after bouncing off the activist wall a couple of times, with the police trying to calm everything down.
When the owners are not in, waiters, runners and bartenders alike appear to disappear, and service can take on a mediocre, almost perfunctory feel.
Lovano once told me how a piece based on a very perfunctory structure "takes total shape on its own" with the right players.
To watch Ms. Dombasle's sloppy, poorly sung concert at the Supper Club on Tuesday evening was to encounter a performer smugly content to express herself with perfunctory hand-on-hip wriggles, gaudy costume changes (from black to gold lamé to tan) and inane patter.
