preachily

"Venice" interweaves the 1980's and the 1970's throughout, yet seems timely ripped from this year's headlines, more preachily than passionately.

As written atmospherically but sometimes preachily by Kathy McWorter, it incorporates a wider array of lessons than it can comfortably handle.

For one thing, the play ends up cartoonishly trivializing the very emotions it preachily purports to underscore - namely, the real anguish of the families of Alzheimer patients.

At that point Mr. Shanley starts to address his questions preachily, shoving his undigested (and unexceptional) views about life on the audience instead of transforming them into theater.

While Hammerstein introduced issues like miscegenation to the musical theater, Sondheim has annexed more complex subjects and dramatized them less preachily: political assassination, cultural imperialism, mass murder, the creation of art, the fear of intimacy and the terror of death.

'To see ourselves as others see us,' was the line my grandmother would always throw out when she was crabby and I was full of myself," is the sort of thing she's wont to declare--wisely, self-deprecatingly, and only somewhat preachily.