Word: caesar
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...your heart, but you do the same thing you do when a man breaks your heart-you go out and get another one." So says Elizabeth Ashley, 37, about the collapse of one of her shows. And just two days after the Broadway closing of G.B. Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra (co-starring Rex Harrison), Ashley appeared in Chicago as one of three Texas sorority sisters who grow up and apart in a Jack Heifner play called Vanities. And when Vanities closes? After 17 roles in the past three years, says Ashley, she is "ready to plant my butt...
...Julius Caesar. Brando and the I--dahs of March. At Emerson Hall 105, on Friday and at the Mather House Dining Hall on Saturday, both days...
...Caesar and Cleopatra is afflicted by the mummy's curse. Despite two or three of the best scenes in the Shavian canon, the play itself may be unworkable: lines by Shaw but construction by Rube Goldberg. Offstage there are battles, mob scenes and the endless clumping of Roman legions. Onstage there are only words; even in this finger exercise for Pygmalion Shaw seemed to be heading toward what he later called playwriting as a "platonic exercise...
...imaginative production might have rescued the good and masked the bad in this 80-year-old drama. Director Ellis Rabb reverses that equation, how ever; his Caesar and Cleopatra is as dull as it is dutiful. Scenes change with astonishing rapidity, but the action seems regulated by an hourglass - an illusion whose secret is best left with Rabb and the Sphinx. Ironically, the one liberty the director has taken, a vigorous pruning to keep the play within two hours, makes Shaw's needlessly complicated plot simply baffling...
...scenery and the costumes, which cost $300,000, are a dazzling plus. But the acting is, surprisingly, no more than competent. Elizabeth Ashley is a vital Cleopatra - half alley cat, half Queen - but more Shakespeare's lady of the Nile than Shaw's. Rex Harrison's Caesar is a burnt-out case who does not seem to remember what it was like to be warm - let alone what it was like to be Caesar. Gerald Clarke