Word: alchemist
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...loudly trumpeted musicals, Allegro and Inside U.S.A., reached Broadway with $500,000 or more already in the till; but far more modest musicals like Make Mine Manhattan and Angel in the Wings proved much better fun. The classics provided some rewarding evenings (Medea, Antony and Cleopatra, The Alchemist) and there was enough Shaw for a minor festival...
...Alchemist (by Ben Jonson; produced by the New York City Theatre Company) is an almost ostentatiously neglected comic masterpiece. It could, without doubt, be shorter. But 300 years after it was written and long after alchemy† went out of fashion, the play still teems with hard, bawdy, farcical fun; still gives that well-mated couple, greed and gullibility, a handsome thrashing; still rushes ahead with a plot that the great Samuel Taylor Coleridge adjudged "one of the three most perfect" in literature...
Last week The Alchemist was given a lively airing-as the first bill in the New York City Center's spring theater program. Set smack in Jonson's lusty London, the play tells of three high-flying cheats, one of whom professes to be an alchemist, and of the brisk trade they drive. Dupes and sharpers alike are finally discomfited; but first the alchemist is sought out by every kind and condition of hopeful, from a modest lawyer's clerk who has an itch to gamble to the City knight, Sir Epicure Mammon, with his sumptuous...
...Green Years," today's offering, is A. J. Cronin's sentimental tale of the life of a Scottish boy who is hampered by poverty, a mean old grandfather, and a foolish old great-grandfather. Some splendid acting by Hume Cronyn and Charles Coburn help a lot, though no alchemist's miracle is achieved...
...financial theories were simpler: create U.S. gold dollars (out of circulation since 1933), British sovereigns and French napoleons and sell them to greedy, panicky black-market speculators. He explained: "The real brain of our association was a Greek, Georges Chou-naris [later arrested] . . . a true artist, a sort of alchemist of the Middle Ages. He combined antimony and lead, then moulded the metal and gold-plated it. Production costs were negligible. In eight months we grossed 100 million francs...