Word: candida
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...blessings of repertory is the second chance. And the third chance. In May, two more big-name migratory workers, José Ferrer and Kate Reid, will come to the Shubert in Long Day's Journey into Night, to be followed by Eva Marie Saint and Fritz Weaver in Candida. Recalling that he was a charter member of earlier Greater Boston repertory companies?the Group 20 Players of Wellesley and the Cambridge Drama Festival?Weaver now jokes about writing a book called Festivals I Have Opened and Closed...
Sarah McCluskey as Candida is a simple case of miscasting. McCluskey evokes only about half the role; she is all matron, and no sexual charmer. Part of the trouble is that she is visually wrong for the part, far too stocky and imposing; more important, she never quite manages to summon up the vitality both men are continually extolling. She's at her best in the last scene, when the script calls for a quiet, calm delivery of her lines...
...result of this miscasting and misdirection is to unbalance the play. On the one hand, Candida becomes a less than credible savior; on the other, Morell is elevated to almost tragic dimensions, while Marchbanks seems no more significant than his own self-characterization as "a little nervous disease." The hardest part of the production to stomach is Marchbanks' final epiphany; at the end, Epstein's Morell is convincingly desolated, but Emerson's poet appears no less...
...Candida is very fine early Shaw; its dialogue is eloquent without being talky, its characters are vivid and complex and its polemics never threaten to overpower the central psychological drama. The Loeb production--spotty as it is--still manages to retain much of the play's original dramatic force. But it succeeds partially only because, with Candida, it would be very hard to fail utterly...
...contrast, the minor roles are handled with a much greater sense of what Shaw is about. Cynthia Cardon is just right as Prossy, Morell's secretary and admirer, snapping out her consonants, as Shaw once suggested she should, with a "ten pound gun hammer spring." Thomas Champion, as Burgess, Candida's father, has a laudable Cockney accent, and Mariani himself oozes idolatrous servility as the cleric Lexy. One of the most successful scenes in the production is the comic encounter between Prossy, Burgess and Marchbanks; in this run-in with characters who have the outlines of caricature, Marchbanks' own exaggerated...