Whether Midler is playing the Rose, Sue Mengers, or Dolly Levi, her quick, exaggeratedly showgirlish walk is a walk away from the audience.
Much as he has a set of different voices — a soft, ruminative tone for conversation, a booming, exaggeratedly countrified delivery when he's playing the role of bullhorn preacher — Kinky has a few different walks.
Putting on an exaggeratedly shrill voice Mr. Gottfried, a native New Yorker who is much calmer and more soft-spoken in person than onstage, has built a lengthy résumé of stand-up shows, celebrity roasts and voice-over work (like playing the parrot Iago in Disney's "Aladdin" movies).
Most of the time the playing stays almost exaggeratedly soft and loose, a studio-based, silence-valuing, meditative sort of jazz that has long marked his own small-group style, as well as the core identity of ECM records — the label for which Mr. Stanko has been recording on and off since 1976 — and which, in a larger sense, owes its life to Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue".
That it's shot and scored (and much of the time acted) as if it were a drama – not exaggeratedly dramatic, with a wink, but played straight – gives the silliness some substance and makes watching a pleasure.
Tony's mother was laughably self-dramatizing and exaggeratedly pathetic, but she was also scary and strong; Ruth, played by Frances Conroy, is merely a doormat for the show's producers to step on.
Beyond Our Ken was written around the imperturbable establishment figure of Horne, while the other performers played a "spectrum of characters never before heard on the radio", including the exaggeratedly upper class Rodney and Charles, the genteel pensioners Ambrose and Felicity, the cook Fanny Haddock a parody of popular TV cook Fanny Cradock and the gardener Arthur Fallowfield.
For example if the word chosen is "impact", you would probably start by acting out the second half, -act, by pulling a book off a shelf and miming exaggeratedly as if you are reading from a play script.
I suppose you could say that this "Carnage" is more exaggeratedly theatrical than the first Broadway version, and that the artificiality of the play's construction is slightly more evident.
