Word: brio
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...meticulous production, beautifully and symmetrically staged in keeping with the symmetrical, Renaissance style of the play. Having played Benedick off and on for 28 years, he gave a performance that was marvelously nuanced. Still, as he himself has admitted, he is not an ideal Benedick. The part demands more brio than he has inside him to give. He plays the clarinet when he should be blowing a trumpet. Yet he was careful to choose a Beatrice that would properly balance the see-saw, in this case Margaret Leighton...
...quarry of the love-chase, the baffled and laughed-at talker, but there is more to the character than the excitable little man he gives us. The "Olympian majesty" specified by Shaw is missing; Tanner's magnificent brashness becomes mere cheek. Mr. Morse can lay down doctrine with considerable brio, but his John Tanner never seems committed to his ideas with any great intensity of the "moral passion" he talks about. It becomes a matter of little significance that the revolutionary activities of this Tanner should be circumscribed by marriage. (His air of frivolity vanishes during the hell scene...
...finest male performance in this production is Jack Bittner's Tybalt. He plays Capulet's war-mongering nephew with brio and brimstone. Though physically very short of stature, Bittner is, by the time he is slain, fully one foot taller. Incidentally, all the swordplay in the production is splendid; arranged by Raymond Saint-Jacques, it is a far cry from the usual mamby-pamby skirmishing...
...Latin Brio. The neo-pagan life of love and love of life revealed to Carmela in these reveries make The Film of Memory a sensuous shelfmate to David Garnett's recently published Aspects of Love (TIME, Jan. 30). French Novelist Maurice Druon, a Prix Goncourt winner, applies Latin brio and an urbane Gallic prose style to his tale, and he can navigate the rapids of a zany stream of consciousness without drowning the reader...
...first movement of Beethoven's Sonata Op. 2, No. 3 was marked Allegro con brio, which Gulda interpreted in terms of jet-age speed and atomic-age heat, and every fast movement for the next hour and a half had a breathless here-we-go-again quality. It would have been just another dead-eye Fred taking pleasure in his fingerwork. except that Gulda's pianissimo was sweet as a barrel of honey, his legato glided like a gull, and his perfect shading gave each movement a convincing contour...