Word: brio
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...buffed to a high gloss for opening nights at the swank Royal Poinciana Playhouse, struck Musical Conductor Fred Waring, 62, as nothing more than a bunch of well-heeled Beachniks. "The biggest, overdressed, overstuffed snobs I've ever seen," said Waring, closing a one-week Playhouse stand con brio. "They leave early, and are past masters in the art of rudeness...
Sticking his right hand under his tuxedo jacket behind his back is not enough to create the malevolent, hunchbacked Richard III. Nor has he the brio for Henry V. In Macbeth's "If it were done, when 'tis done, then 'were well/It were done quickly," etc., he follows the idiotic example of Kemble, Macready and Irving by making a full stop after 'well' and joining the rest to the next sentence. And from time to time to time Warren Enters, the director, allows Evans to lapse into his annoying mannerism of indulging in quavering drops of pitch at-phrases' ends...
Siepi booms out this amiably imbecilic libretto with Mozartian brio, but his face is as unbending as Alan Ladd's. As the girl in Giovanni's life, brunette beauty Michele Lee owes all her best lines to nature. Though only 19, she seems to have acquired the false vivacity and hackneyed mannerisms of generations of musicomedy ingenues. Swooping about the stage like a benign witch out of a child's storybook, fortyish ex-Ballerina Maria Karnilova, who plays a mate-hungry widow, is remarkably agile and refreshingly comic...
...flash of a lightning bug. Drake is more than a star; he is a galaxy. Whether he is profile-preening for an expected lady love, slashing the air with his fencing foil, or parrying insults with the Prince of Wales, he has all the darkling dash, swagger and brio of a Renaissance man. He pours his voice like nut-brown ale through a melodic sieve of a score...
Louis Edmonds makes an impressive figure of the pivotal peculator Count La Ruse. His control and taste lapse only at rare moments, and he has considerable authority, elegance, and brio besides. As his mistress and nemesis, Robin Howard is asked to cope with a part that calls for the sort of compelling distinction that Siobhan McKenna and Colleen Dewhurst and very few others can command. On this level Miss Howard simply hasn't got it, but she is a competent actress with a splendid pair of shoulders. Lee Henry is similarly undefinitive but competent as Ultimate Evil. Arthur Malet cannot...