Word: britomart
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Andrew Undershaft (Philip Bosco) is a munitions magnate. Having renounced his family some 20 years before, he suddenly descends upon them. His wife Lady Britomart (Rachel Gurney) is the same socially ingratiating charmer she always was. Undershaft finds his son Stephen (Nicholas Walker) a simp of propriety, and to his dismay learns that his mettlesome daughter Barbara (Laurie Kennedy) has become a devoted minion of the Salvation Army. Her adoring shadow is Adolphus Cusins (Nicolas Surovy), an elitist teacher of Greek. When Undershaft taunts him as "Euripides" and Cusins flings back "Machiavelli," the tycoon is rather taken with the scholar...
...play is less polemical than comedic. It begins .with a family confab in Lady Britomart Undershaft's London town house. Long estranged from Andrew, the haughty lady (Betty Leighton) knows her select social turf, but that's all. Daughter Sarah (Janet Barkhouse) is enamored of a bean-brained fop (Briain Pet-chey) and Barbara is in love with Adolphus Cusins (Tom Kneebone), an impecunious teacher of Greek...
...possesses a fine sense of Shavian wit. Terrence Currier as Snobby Price, the hypocritically reformed worker, and Lawrence Pressman as Bill Walker, the unreformed bully, skillfully carry their roles as far as their director will let them. Surrounded by these fine performers, Joan White seems weak as Lady Britomart. She fails to convey the strength and self-importance that one should expect from the sole manager of a large household...
Shaw is Shaw, however, and he never lets the moralizing get you down. Major Barbara is a funny show and the Loeb production loses none of that humor. There's the menagerie of Lady Britomart, Undershaft's estranged wife. Her son Stephen (Charles Degelman) cavills, while her son-in-law-to-be (William Docken) snivels, while Roger Zim as a ghoulish, confused butler looks...
Emily Levine as Lady Britomart, and Hamilton Corbett as Barbara's professor-fiancee, are the best of the leads. Miss Levine's portrayal of the imperious lady who has her son transfer a cushion from chair to chair as she moves is clear and consistent. Corbett's Adolphus Cusins believably combines modesty, erudition, cynicism, and animal...
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