Constructor: Michelle Kenney and Jeff Chen
Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (also, oversized / 16-wide)
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THEME: INTERMISSION (37A: Break ... such as at the middle of 18-, 27-, 50- or 58-Across?)— circled letters in themers spell out name of famous Broadway production, and since those names are "broken" (split between beginning and end of answers), then the gap between the circled letters ... is an INTERMISSION? Yes. That must be it.
Theme answers:
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Many things wrong here, most notably the wording of the revealer clue. If you ask me to look "at the middle of" those themers, what I see is *gibberish*. WAIIANA! EKV! SECRA! Or my favorite, MOPAN! There's just a structural problem, where the INTERMISSION is the place between, and the place between is just a letter string that is nonsensical on its own. Also, this whole embedding non-consecutive letters as part of your themer is pretty rudimentary, and definitely not worth bloating the grid to 16-wide. Further, I just don't like the themers. They don't have much appeal on their own. Then there's the fussiness of so many multi-word half-colloquialisms. I like BE THAT WAY!, but a lot of the rest of it felt like forced attempts at slanginess. DID A SET is bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. A notch down from READ A BOOK and a notch up from ATE SOME TOAST. I like GOD NO! pretty well, but it was brutally hard to get (esp. for a Tuesday) (26D: Emphatic rejection). Clue was just too vague / broad. Also, count the number of "comma informally" clues in this puzzle. One is OK. Two should be the max. There are two among themers alone. And then another at 9D: Utmost, informally (DARNEDEST). What the hell? Maybe do a little more to vary your cluing language. Flawed theme concept + just OK fill = not great. Might be above average for a Tuesday, but that bar is low. Too low.
Bullets:
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Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (also, oversized / 16-wide)
Theme answers:
- HAWAIIAN AIR (18A: Honolulu-based carrier, informally)
- GREEK VASE (27A: Piece of pottery featuring Achilles, say)
- CAMO PANTS (50A: Military bottoms, informally)
- WISECRACKED (58A: Made snappy comments)
Rudolf "Rudi" Gernreich (August 8, 1922 – April 21, 1985) was an Austrian-born American fashion designer whose avant-garde clothing designs are generally regarded as the most innovative and dynamic fashion of the 1960s. He purposefully used fashion design as a social statement to advance sexual freedom, producing clothes that followed the natural form of the female body, freeing them from the constraints of high fashion. (wikipedia)
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Bullets:
- ABCTV (10D: "Fresh Off the Boat" network)— yeah no one calls TV networks blahblahblahTV so please stop.
- SINKER (47D: Baseball pitch that suddenly drops)— well, this is better than yesterday's baseball pitch clue, which referred to a "slider" as a "curveball" (!?), but like a good fastball, these baseball clues should have a little life on them. Baseball is fun—give us something less literal and workmanlike.
- NIETO (64A: Enrique Peña ___, Mexican president beginning in 2012)— I'm having trouble making his name stick. Don't know why. Maybe because he's not as charismatic as Vincente Fox? Maybe because I don't see his name very much (in news or in crosswords)? Dunno.
- GINKGO (6D: Tree whose leaves appear in many Chinese fossils)— forever I will misspell this word. Forever. Oh, GINGKO, I just can't quit you.
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