But often, the pithy guest stars outshone the performances and doled out some memorable moments of their own.
"It's not easy to be able to do a very pithy comment on someone's dance performance.
But the ensemble's performances of Berg's pithy "Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano" and Webern's expressive "Four Pieces for Violin and Piano" underscored that both composers sprang from a common artery.
In ten lines, the intern in question relates a hospital drama — a patient in trouble, "a new chest tube to suction" — and concludes with a superior's pithy, annihilating verdict on the intern's performance: "the needle was / in the wrong place, / just like me".
Even so, and despite pithy contributions from the principal wind players, the performance seemed overly decorous.
Taken separately, Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times, the performances "have the clarity and force of pithy instrumental solos insistently piercing through a dense cacophony".
For the first 20 minutes or so, "Hunchback" appears to be a dance performance or mime show, with the masked actors performing wordlessly to a cacophonous carillon-based score (by Michael Zerang) and pithy supertitles labeling the scenes -- "The Torture of Quasimodo" -- on a paper scroll mounted high against the rear wall of the stage.
Both are full of pithy dialog and really good character development, aided by inspiring performances from Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Alan Tudyk, Morena Baccarin, Adam Baldwin, Summer Glau, and the rest of the cast.
In his testimony, Chris Blanchard, a former president of the Massey subsidiary Performance Coal, which operated the Upper Big Branch Mine, provided a pithy summary of the collapse of West Virginia's regulatory might: "It was cheaper to pay the fines than the cost of preventing violations".
The assumed idea was that Wolf-Hunkeler would "roll on water," but reported technical difficulties that hampered the effect caused it to garner punny and pithy headlines like artnet News's "Maurizio Cattelan's Wheelchair-on-Water Performance Is More Dunk Than Slam Dunk" and incited the discussion of his possible exploitation of Wolf-Hunkeler.
