hammy

While the focus of the play is rightfully on King Arthur (a hammily dour Lorenz Martinez) and his handful of knights, each of the supporting actors is given his moment to shine.

It was amusing for about 20 minutes of the opera's nearly two-hour length, whereupon Alden's all-too-familiar devices--overturned chairs, wall-hugging, floor-crawling and clothes-shedding singers, hammily rendered cadenzas and pauses and so on--began to grate rather than charm.

(Even the exorbitantly self-important Orson Welles, playing the hammily didactic Shadow, wouldn't have dared to presume so monstrously upon his audience's patience.) Although Rand insisted no philosopher save Aristotle influenced her, Galt's address is, in both tone and substance, an unmistakable lift from Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra.

JIM Broadbent may be a famous actor but, according to witnesses, his portrayal of Sir Denis Thatcher in a new film is "hammily overblown".

"The Ancestor" describes "freely and hammily," in the style of an old-fashioned waltz ("with some modern reality thrown in"), a family's old treasures, not passed down through generations but perhaps purchased at flea markets or found in the attic: a nineteenth century Hungarian portrait, a straw-hatted man in a daguerreotype, the Webster's dictionary with an inscription to a stranger, and more.

Early bits in which Sanford hammily tests viewer patience could be trimmed, and several parodic original-song interludes would be better off as DVD extras.

No wonder this lumpy, hammily plotted book filled with pages of undigested pseudo-scholarship has become a cult; no wonder that it occurs at the same time as the outer-suburban prefab churches fill with thousands writhing in tongues to thematised hard-rock; and no wonder that the Catholic church has spent a lot of energy challenging and debunking it.

However, the ways of true love don't sit well with Ivy's village idiot chum Noah (Adrian Brody in hammily mannered overdrive) and suffice to say things occur that require Ivy, dressed up as Little Yellow Riding Hood, to be taken by dad to The Old Shed That Is Not To Be Used and sent off through the woods on a life or death mission.

"The conversation in our local pub is so interesting because it's about stuff," she says, widening her eyes hammily.

Campbell is so hammily demented that it's difficult to believe Slim is the only person to spot the psychopath lurking behind her husband's well-to-do public facade.