It is coping with the stream of people who seize their chance to trot out the one theatrical phrase that everybody on the planet knows.
These dramatizations lack the theatrical timing and phrasing of the Funk Brothers just spinning the tales, which Mr. Justman allows them to do at their own leisurely pace as they explain how the Motown founder, Berry Gordy, hired them.
That's about as tense as their exchanges ever get, even if what's at stake is nothing less profound than the very nature of friendship and its effect on the perilous dictates of passion.The language strains for theatrical credibility, with phrases like "the hopeless longing for otherness" hanging, well, hopelessly in the air.
But, as President, Obama has revealed himself to have a certain disdain for the emotional, for the memorable phrase and the theatrical gesture.
Reviews in London were actually fairly rosy about the production, tossing around phrases like "sheer theatrical magic," with only the occasional sourpuss saying the show was mechanical.
The quicksilver Shantala Shivalingappa (a master of Kuchipudi, an Indian classical-dance form), Fang-Yi Sheu (a former Martha Graham dancer), and Holley Farmer (a Merce Cunningham veteran) will add a theatrical element, each performing a phrase that was shot by Michalek, followed by the slow-motion video and a discussion.
Reading her work demands a constant choice between two, equally compelling portraits of the author: a Didion who is raw, vulnerable and confessional and a Didion who is calculating, theatrical and — to use a phrase she once applied to her prose — "totally in control".
"Every phrase, every vocal gesture and every theatrical move has been painstakingly considered," Bernard Holland wrote in The New York Times, "making this Carmen more a collection of calculated details than an entity in itself.
Her straightforward theatrical style incorporates only the tiniest smidgens of jazz phrasing.
Her attention to text was also notable in songs like Charles Villiers Stanford's "Belle Dame Sans Merci," in which she sang the phrase "and her eyes were wild" with theatrical flair.
