As Tom, the play's regretful narrator, the superb Mr. Harner speaks with a sly, audience-courting facetiousness that is also informed by an air of perpetual apology.
A sly dig at Sly Audiences at Sylvester Stallone's new Rambo movie will be entertained by a sly trailer before the main feature entitled Son of Rambow - not yet another Stallone sequel but a delightful British, 1980s-set comedy about two schoolboys adapting scenes from First Blood to make their own home videos.
Sly gains audience with the Grand Mysterium, who tells him that in the next universe, species known as "Chaos" and "Order" fought a bitter war.
The Aussie battler was assisted by security guards back onstage and carried on with the song – giving the cheering audience a sly little smile.
I have always thought of Pilate's question as a kind of wink from God, a sly aside to the audience that says, in effect, "Be careful of anyone who thinks he has all the answers; only I do".
He often projects a kind of complicity with the audience, a sly little side glance, even as Daniel Craig's benign ish) stalker in Enduring Love, or Ben Stiller's hip chum in Greenberg.
This is amusingly ridiculous taken at face value, but for an art audience such sly humor speaks to a long-standing anxiety in Modernist culture: should art be effete, effeminate and decorative or be earthy, masculine and bravely adventurous?
At the final applause, Rees and Rivera kiss, he giving the audience a sly wink over her shoulder.
Unlike contemporary kids' movies, which tend to appeal to parents in the audience with sly in-jokes and pop culture references dating back to the Clinton administration, Wee Sing Together refuses to cater to grown-up tastes as an adult, it's impossible to watch the movie without being bored or resorting to snarky analysis, but you understand why Sally's red party dress appeals to young children.
So Universal lured audiences with sly oneupsmanship regarding the scale of the new film – witness the gag in the trailer with the mosasaur swallowing a dangling great white – and let carefully calibrated nostalgia for the original do the rest.
What she offers the audience, instead, is sly bemusement laced with complicity.
