Word: boyden
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Giamatti also sent copies of his letter, dated March 19, to Terrell Bell, U.S. Secretary of Education, and Boyden Gray, executive director of a federal task force on regulatory reform, which Bush heads...
ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT, the broadest wit of the twentieth century, returns to abuse and tickle the audience of Howard Teichmann's elegant one man show, Smart Aleck. Peter Boyden brings a lighthearted grace to the stage as the New York Times critic and founder of the Algonquin Round table. He evokes the theater and manners of the twenties and thirties with anecdotes and witticisms and carries off Woollcott's bitchy sexlessness with impeccable style. Introducing himself as "Alexander Woollcott, an American Original," Boyden launches into an amusing biography spiced with puns and literary anecdotes...
Whipping through Woollcott's early years, Boyden maintains a constant dialogue with the audience. He interjects Woollcott's acerbic, self-deprecatory observations with venomous barbs flung disarmingly into the audience. Boyden weaves together Woollcott's conflicting guises by slipping easily from Woollcotts-as-narrator to Woollcott-on-the-scene, as when he details his reaction to his father's death--a cold identification of a body on a slab; or to his sister's death--a slow, emotional reading of a letter to a mutual friend. This lachrymose, sentimental scene, which closes the first act, strikes an incongruous note amid...
...organizations sponsoring his lectures to put him up for the night. His cutting rudeness as a guest inspired the George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart collaboration, The Man Who Came To Dinner. Woollcott's jabs seemed to delight him as much as they did his audience. Under Boyden's withering glares, they fall artfully in place...
...placed Woolcott firmly in his time. His light direction conveys Woolcott's manner and speech, lapsing melodramatically out of character only at the end of the first act. The lighting, by Vincent DiGabriele, is discrete, the set, by Tony Cooper, comfortable and prepossessing. But most important is Peter Boyden's admirable characterization, which he carries with a presence and manner that convey every nuance of the man. Woollcott would have been flattered...