This allows Mr. Jenkin to spin out elaborate verbal riffs - some clever, some tired - while blurring the edges between real and fictive worlds.

The verbal riffs perpetrated with fantastic elan by Big Boy Caprice include a reference to Nietzsche that I shall remember for many a year.

Sanford sometimes relies too much on her characters' verbal riffs and forgoes the deeper soul music, but when she's got it together, she's very, very good.

Mixing diatribe and affirmation, her bountiful and bawdy verbal riffs alternate with sturdy vocal interpolations.

I love hot dogs, but I was a vegetarian for 22 years," he said, in one of many verbal riffs.

This gave rise to scenes such as the one where Mr. Williams, playing Ray in his jail cell, embarked on an extended verbal riff with an actual prisoner, Bay, in the cell next door.

He would begin by intoning such slangy verbal riffs as: "Hiya cat, wipe your feet on the mat.

The playwright adorns the music of his words with 10 original jazz/blues compositions by Keb' Mo', just as Mr. Glover's verbal riffs embellish the music in a masterly collaboration.

In the waning moments, Mr. McCowen even achieves a chilling theatrical image - the production's only one - to go with the many facile verbal riffs.

He also has a gift for elaborate verbal riffs that turn his long-suffering blues into comedy.