The Girl in the Dark is a potent character, and it may soon appear onscreen.
Nonetheless, she is the book's only potent character, a smooth, confident seductress, using Benjamin for sex while he is her more or less passive object.
She sees and judges everything, and is a lioness in defence of Mariko Kida's Juliet, a similarly potent character who mixes wilfulness with self absorption and wide-eyed curiosity, qualities that colour her duets with Romeo.
It is not like, say, the 1950's, when the bad mother portrayed in best-selling advice books and magazines was a scarily potent character, capable of causing autism, homosexuality and the spread of Communism, while the good mother, like a domesticated superhero, upheld the American Way.
Perhaps the most potent character trait of traditional Jewish identity is a sense of the other, a respect for the other, an honoring of the other.
Scott Mendelson, also of The Huffington Post, felt that when you put the "glaring issues aside," the film "still works as a potent character study and a glimpse inside a world we'd rather pretend does not exist in America".
But while the film "succeeds as a powerful acting treat and a potent character study, there are some major narrative issues that prevent the film from being an accidental masterpiece".
It may lack the hit tunes that audiences expect from Puccini, but it contains some of his grandest, darkest music, and its heroine, Minnie, is one of the most potent female characters in opera — a saloon owner who plays men's games and then breaks down their macho codes.
Director J.J. Abrams and fellow screenwriters Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt have come up with some potent new characters and outstanding moments.
After On the Buses made him a star, there was probably little else that Lewis – a competent actor though of limited range – could do other than embrace the typecasting of so potent a character wholeheartedly, though off-screen photographs show a relaxed, easy-going, humorous face: the scowling, squinting, grotesque Blakey was very much a mask.
