Word: best
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Ronald Coralian, who is surely one of the College's best actors, gives a relentlessly taut performance as Rubashov, doomed. He plays with conviction and never moves away from the heart of a long and great part. Sharon Connolley, the bourgeois temptation who is a symbol of the humanity that he finds foreign to the Party, succeeds in conveying simplicity in a very complex world; she has a presence. William Noble, in the role of 402 who occupies the cell next to Rubashov, plays with primitive charm and excitement. Alfred Bakhash, another prisoner, presents a remarkable caricature in the first...
David Amram's musical score is fairly good--easily his best writing to date. And even the playbill covers and posters are tastefully artistic...
Walter Kerr (Herald Tribune) thought it "a sober and handsome monument... enormously impressive." Richard Watts (Post) called it "a fine drama" with "stunning performances," and John Chapman (Daily News) wrote, "A magnificent production of a truly splendid play." John McLain (Journal-American) went so far as to say, "The best play of this or many seasons... reaches heights of poetry and performance seldom attempted in the recent history of the American stage." John Mason Brown '23 did this one better by exclaiming, "Never such greatness in the theatre--not since Mourning Becomes Electra, Green Pastures or Our Town...
...Village Voice by Jerry Tallmer, who added a few salvos of his own. Said he, "It is, in the kindest of all possible considerations, a big windy non-drama about God, Satan, and Job retold rather in the manner of such movies as Since You Went Away and The Best Years of Our Lives," and "written in what is also a sort of Hollywood verse." His reaction to the production, furthermore, was only lukewarm. Henry Hewes (Saturday Review) dismissed J.B. as "just an inconclusive effort...
There remains only to report that J.B. last week received an award as "the best American play of 1958" from Boston station WGBH-TV and Elliot Norton '26, the dean of the local critical fraternity. It is a safe bet that J.B. will have garnered further honors by the end of the theatre season...