Word: aristocratic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...bare stage surrounded by low-tech scaffolding that rises to the rafters and rings the balcony, the R.S.C. tells this 800-page story of a young innocent in the first years of Victoria's reign. The company's 39 actors essay upwards of 250 roles, from weak-willed aristocrat to poor heroic cripple. The play dives into Dickensian bathos, preposterous coincidences, abrupt reversals of fortune, the collision of improbable goodness with impossible evil?and emerges triumphant, soaring with spirit. In the process it displays the grandest theatrical techniques, affirms the Tightness of love and friendship, revives pleasures and poignancies that...
...scenes are intercut: one pair of actors converses, then falls silent as another, perhaps standing between them, provides exposition on the same subject. The actors coalesce to form an encroaching wall of bodies, the blinking façade of a rich man's house, a Hydrahead of starving Londoners, an aristocrat's carriage (complete with rearing horse). Nicholas and Kate take Smike to the garden of their childhood home?and Kate, in an idyllic gesture that mixes memory and reverie, whirls twice around and into the arms of her two men, her two playmates, her forever family...
Also fired were Sir Ian Gilmour, a haughty and intellectual aristocrat who was Deputy Foreign Secretary, and Education Secretary Mark Carlisle. Both men had expressed doubts about Thatcher's economic policies. Afterward Gilmour confessed that he had written his resignation a month ago in the full expectation that he would be fired. "Every Prime Minister has to reshuffle from time to time," he said in his resignation broadside. "It does no harm to throw the occasional man overboard, but it does not do much good if you are steering full speed ahead for the rocks." Humphrey Atkins, a Thatcher...
...jokes played on the characters and the audience. But there are good sitcoms and bad, and Continental Divide is superior. John Belushi has dispensed with his randy Neanderthal persona to play that most hallowed of Hollywood leading-man roles: the extraordinary ordinary guy. Blair Brown is an earthy aristocrat and a resourceful actress: her face puffs and blotches beautifully when Nell's emotions demand it. If they are not quite Tracy and Hepburn, they will do until the real thing comes along-on the Late Show, in Woman of the Year or Pat and Mike, models for Kasdan...
...this production is not as memorable as the original, however, it is still, by the standards of most musicals, very good indeed. Nicholas Wyman is a delightfully silly Freddy Eynsford-Hill, the bumbling aristocrat who falls in love with Eliza at Ascot and thereafter spends most of his time burbling love songs on the street where she lives. Milo O'Shea, who plays her father, Alfred P. Doolittle, is a fine and feisty rogue, and Jack Gwillim manages to be both good-hearted and hopelessly stuffy, just as Colonel Pickering, that confirmed old bachelor, should be. Cecil Beaton...