Word: becking
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Skin Of Our Teeth, as Stephen Nightingale directs it at Lowell House, carries off Wilder's con game with only a few pratfalls. The play is a loosely conceived Everyman telling the never-ending story of Mr. George Antrobus (Stuart Beck), his wife (Mary Belle Felten-stein), and two kids (John Sansone and Jody Adams). Wilder places this New Jersey family in the Ice Age, the flood, and the end of World War II (which wasn't over in 1942), revelling in anachronism and exploded convention...
...Lowell House production does this admirably most of the time, but has a tendency to mix, or imperfectly finish its conventions. The third act opening (where the play stops because seven of the company are struck with botulism) is magnificent and hilarious because the whole company, especially Beck and Jamie Rosenthal (playing a Miss Somerset playing Sabina, George Antrobus' maid and quondam mistress) degenerates from high flown symbols to grumbling Loebies. The switch is drastic and devastating...
...eternal feminine. But it is her voice that commands. Her motions are stiff and awkward in key scenes. Nightingale who outfits a comic chorus with amazing props and movements (they make marvelous animals going into the Ark), seems to have directed disembodied voices in the serious scenes. Even Beck, the company's most polished performer, often appears unsure of what to do with his hands at dramatic moments. The power of the scenes, especially the ends of the three acts, is undercut...
Most of the alumni don't feel overly rah-rah about Tacoma's McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary; but for ex-Teamsters Boss Dave Beck, 72, the place was a veritable Vic Tanny's West. Released 22 months ago, after serving half of a five-year stretch for income tax evasion, Beck boasts that "I came out in better shape than I went in." Since the kind of Gemiitlichkeit that goes with his $50,-000-a-year Teamsters pension was out, he picked up "the exercise habit" in the hoosegow, made it a point...
...strawberries, and strawberries the actor got on opening night; but when the reviews turned up terrible, Merrick instantly reduced him to radishes. Barbra Streisand, who appeared in Merrick's / Can Get It for You Wholesale in 1962, is still squawking because David bought her shoes by A. S. Beck instead of Capezio. Carol Channing reports that one night when she was slipping out of the Hello, Dolly! stage door in a full show costume that included an expensive pair of dancing shoes that Merrick had bought for her, he demanded indignantly where she was going. "To do a benefit...