Word: acted
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Even allowing for opening-night delays, however, the play seemed over-long. The episode involving a trumpeter in the first part of Act One added little to the humor and nothing to the play. Following on a witty prologue, it bogged down the proceedings and was not aided by the actors concerned. Omitting it entirely would be a great improvement...
Actually, both sides had been willing to get together all along, if a nice legal way could be found to do it. In the old days, record makers paid royalties directly into the union's welfare fund, which Petrillo controls. The Taft-Hartley Act stopped that: it forbade the union to have the sole say-so on the fund. Now that everyone was friendly again, neither side expected any trouble in finding a neutral trustee to handle the money, acceptable both to Uncle Sam and to Little Caesar Petrillo...
...chain of symbolic predictions about her: a crushed flower, shaken windows, violent death in starlight at 11 sharp, at the feet of a lion. Gail's scientific sweetheart (John Lund), Detective Shawn (William Demarest) and various shifty-looking businessmen who might profit by Gail's death, all act as if Robinson were crazy or criminal. Everybody tries to keep him away from the menaced young woman he is trying to save. And sure enough, a flower gets stepped on, wind smacks the windows open, a lion breaks loose from a zoo, the grandfather clock bongs...
...textbooks. He seems rather a man of massive and unfocused gifts, a soldier and editor restlessly writing poetry to find an outlet for the river of ideas that flowed through him. Even the famous letters to Mrs. Sarah Whitman, with their italics and exclamation points and their second-act curtain speeches, do not seem the love letters of a poet: they are rather the letters of a practical man acting the way he thinks a poet is expected to act. They are neither tragic nor funny; they are too miserable to be tragicomic...
...this act, he not only kept the halftime score down to a respectable 13 to 7 beating, but also accounted for exactly one-half of the Crimson's total yardage for the entire game...