Word: benet
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...Manhattan last week the American Lyric Theatre entered the second week of its debutante season. First week, it had launched the folksy opera, The Devil and Daniel Webster, by Douglas Moore and Stephen Vincent Benet. This it followed with an operetta based upon Stephen Foster tunes, Susanna Don't You Cry, which, for all its musical charm and its flashy mounting by Robert Edmond Jones, had a plot which died of Southern molassitude. The Lyric Theatre next put on an evening of dancing by Lincoln Kirstein's Ballet Caravan-an uninspired Air and Variations to music by Bach...
...kind of folksy Faustus, Mr. Benet's fable relates how a New Hampshire farmer, in return for ten years of prosperity, sold his soul to the devil. To his wedding in 1841 come Secretary of State Daniel Webster (to kiss the bride) and the Devil (to have his due). Neighbor Webster, the great lawyer, defends Farmer Stone before a special jury of villains out of Hell and U. S. history, wins an acquittal by touching their memories of Freedom...
Critics applauded the composer for leaving pithy dialogue to be spoken instead of sung, for his generally apt orchestration and unobtrusive transitions. Like Poet Benet's verses, the music is homespun to a turn. Far less spontaneous and intense than The Cradle Will Rock (TIME June 28,1937), No. 1 operatic experiment with topical U. S. material, The Devil and Daniel Webster is well staged and occasionally rises above self-conscious Americanism...
Review. In 1924, Henry Seidel Canby, William Rose Benet and Christopher Morley took The Saturday Review of Literature out of the New York Evening Post, launched it as a separate publication. Its amiable reviews, amiable literary gossip, mildly titillating personal ads, weekly word puzzle, reached some 30,000 readers. Dr. Canby stepped down as editor in 1936, irascible Bernard De Voto stepped up. Two years later De Voto turned over direction to young, good-natured George Stevens. Last week another shake-up left The Saturday Review with the same editors but new owners. Purchaser was tall, hard-working Joseph Hilton...
Harwood used as his passage "After Munich", from Neville Chamberlain's September speech, while Blackwell delivered excerpts from Stephen Vincent Benet's "John Brown's Body." "Patterns of Survival" by John H. Bradley was Whittier's passage and Thomas a Becket's Christmas Sermon as rendered by T. S. Eliot '10 in his "Murder in the Cathedral" was chosen by Bernard Rivin...