Word: background
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Webster Lithgow, whose arrangement of the bare stage for Six Characters was unobtrusively correct and atmospherically grubby, has under-estimated the need for Victorian naturalism in the settings for Earnest, which should never be designed by anyone but Cecil Beaton. The play is very carefully related to its background in life--Wilde even knows the address of John Worthing's town house. (Fen Lasell's formidable costumes are much more in the vein, because they appear impeccably "period...
...blonde relaxes across the sofa. Pink dress, pink shoes, pink toenails and pink lipstick dominate a background of blue phlox and red roses. "John," she calls. "Bring in the babies...
Valentino & Brando. Harry Belafonte's background is an arresting mixture of black and white ancestry, of Harlem harshness and the West Indian languor, of Broadway jazz caves, Greenwich Village hash houses, efficient modern recording studios. Throughout he has clung to a certain tough quality that can flash out as easily as his boyish smile. Recently TV Director Don Medford tried to define the key to Belafonte's dramatic magnetism: "Behind him is this hard core of hostility. Like Brando, Jimmy Dean, Rod Steiger, he's loaded with it." The quality lends a demon drive to Belafonte...
...local crime syndicate, doctors in Madrid have told him that he has cancer, and he is nagged by the conviction that as a bad Catholic he has small chance of dying in a state of grace. Dr. Chance seems to him the man who might save him. Against a background of native political unrest, Chance becomes part of Macgrady's crowd. He goes to dope parties in the native quarter, drinks only a little less than Macgrady, and has the bad luck to fall in love with his patient's beautiful young wife Anna...
...tongue-lash the Senate: "You, Romans, friends and countrymen, have heard me before. I come not to honor Rome but to bury her." Author Caldwell ends her story as Lucanus meets Christ's mother, in a din of paraphrased Hail Marys and purple Passion ("She stood against the background of the hot and brazen mounts, and it seemed to him that she had grown very tall, and that she was clothed in pure light, and that her face beamed like the moon when it was full"'). In short, the book-a sure bestseller-is about...