Word: anouilh
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Giant Abstraction. Julie would be the last to agree with the Barrymore boast -but the dare was exciting. Last week on Broadway she took it. She opened as Joan of Arc in Lillian Hellman's adaptation of The Lark from the French of Jean Anouilh. Her previous roles, no matter how complex, had kept within the limits of "colloquial drama." She had played people of life size in a theater of the norm, and she had only to cut herself to make her characters bleed. Joan, however, was not merely a human being, into whose feelings an actress...
...moves in, takes its course. In a matter of moments it is clear that the London fiasco is not to be repeated by Producer Kermit Bloomgarden. For that production Christopher Fry had done a literal translation from the French. For this one Lillian Hellman has cut 43 pages of Anouilh -and ennui. What is left, while faithful to the original in scenic form, has been trenchantly rewritten by one of the ablest theater minds in the U.S., and the result is intellectual theater at close to its best. The ideas that the drama deals in are among the grandest...
...Great Mountain. To Julie, this was Joan; but to Anouilh, Joan was "the lark" -a spirit of "unbodied joy" that sings down out of unseen height upon the desperate world and lifts the human heart up to its hope. Julie set grimly to work, 15 hours a day, to reconcile these opposites in her performance. At the first run-through she had such power that a critical audience of theatrical professionals was sobbing unashamedly at the final line. At the Boston opening the critics cried "tremendous," but one of them fairly noted that she was sometimes "a little childish." Under...
...though thanks to Comic Nancy Walker, who was very funny when she had material and in places when she hadn't, the largely uninspired revue. Phoenix '55, made a dent. But far funnier was the off-Broadway Shoestring Revue; and there were such other achievements as Jean Anouilh's gay and witty Thieves' Carnival, a stylish revival of Congreve's Way of the World, a sensitive revival-in Stark Young's admirable new translation-of Chekhov's The Three Sisters. Despite much that is amateurish or pretentious, off-Broadway increasingly ministers to sound...
...Colombe, as in so many of his other plays (Legend for Lovers, Cry of the Peacock), Anouilh has looked at the face of Love and found once again that it mirrors little more than self-gratification. In its alternations of farce and tragedy, flamboyance and reserve, sweetness and acid, Colombe is as colorful as a pousse cafe. But, like a pousse cafe, it may not be to everyone's taste...