Word: broadway
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...failure. A flop, in the words Walter Kerr used a few years back to describe a fiasco called Kelly, is "a bad idea gone wrong." Such a show, through its total ineptitude, can often be very funny. (A knowledgeable friend of mine who saw Kelly's one and only Broadway performance counts it among the most hilarious evenings he's ever spent in a theatre.) A failure, on the other hand, is a good idea gone wrong. It's usually boring...
...that is by far the best work that the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater has ever offered, Lee J. Cobb gives the finest performance of a lengthy and distinguished acting career. A graduate of the militantly proletarian Group Theater of the late '30s, he was the quintessential Willy Loman in Broadway's first production of Death of a Salesman. Conventionally cast as a Hollywood heavy in many of his countless films (among them: Thieves' Highway, On the Waterfront), he almost invariably brought glimmerings of insight to even the most routine parts. At the age of 57, he is quite clearly ready...
Goldman, who adapted the screenplay from his 1966 Broadway drama, can hardly be blamed for that, but he does not even seem to know who the real James Goldman is. Sometimes he seems to be a swaggering Elizabethan playwright whose rhetorical sword never gets out of its scabbard. "The sky is pocked with stars," sighs Henry. "Has my willow turned to poison oak?" he inquires of his mistress. At other times, Goldman is an anachronistic historian. "It's 1183, and we're all barbarians," announces the Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn). Often Goldman is simply...
...something in O'Neill refuses to be belittled. It is as if his greatness lies in his will to be great. His passionate intentions, in fact, become his talent-a rude, almost barbaric thrust that can seize a blase Broadway crowd and wring it dry, half from fatigue, half from an emotional buffeting that no other American playwright ever inflicted on an audience. O'Neill could do what only a major artist can do: make his public share in the life of his private demons...
Gothic Tastes. O'Neill the sometime melodramatist could not have improved upon his own beginnings. He was born on a grey, showery day in October 1888 in the Barrett House, a family hotel fittingly located on Broadway. (During his last illness in Boston 65 years later, he was to raise himself from a stupor and cry: "Born in a goddam hotel room and dying in a hotel room!") His father, James O'Neill, a famous romantic actor of the day. was giving something like his 1,400th performance in Monte Cristo, the play which for over a quarter...