Word: candida
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From a 45-year-old play, the Army & Navy Relief Funds benefited handsomely last week, but a thirsty theater public benefited more. Revived with an all-star cast at special Broadway matinees, Shaw's Candida was greeted by despairing critics the way castaways greet a ship...
George Bernard Shaw is one of the few men who is just as good as he thinks he is. For although "Candida" is a play of cosier and snugger England, safe from air raids and the Red menace, there is nothing cost or snug or dated about the bearded Fabian's timeless masterpiece. Nor is there anything dated about Cornelia Otis Skinner who looks almost too young for thirty year old Candida...
...story of the wise and lovely Candida, the shy and passionate young poet and the outwardly magnificent minister is almost too well-known to bear retelling. Candida is forced to choose between her husband, a complacent and fabulously successful preacher, and David Marchbanks, a sensitive and pathetic boy of eighteen who "understands" her, And paradoxically it is the Reverend James Mavor Morell who wins out, because he is weaker in hid magnificent external strength than Marchbanks, who clings to his loneliness and misery as a retreat form a world where you have to decide how much to tip the cabby...
...excellent. John Cromwell is a sensitive and appealing Marchbanks; in clumsier hands Marchbanks can be clowned like a Tarkingtonian adolescent. Onslow Stevens as well as Cromwell has steered clear of extremes. His Morell id not too pompous and too fond of his own voice to be loved by Candida. And Dorothy Sands is the old-maid incarnate in the role of Miss Proserpine Garnett, Morell's typist who is as much in love with him as all his feminine flock...
...dislikes to which Actress Cornell owns up is a dislike for the star system. It delighted her to exchange "Katharine Cornell in-" for "Katharine Cornell Presents." All the same, after Katharine Cornell came brilliantly of age, at the end of 1924, with Candida, she reveled in mediocre plays (The Green Hat, The Age of Innocence, Dishonored Lady) with fat, showy star parts. She complains that as the heroine of the vastly overrated The Barretts of Wimpole Street she did nothing but "feed" the rest of the cast-but as Elizabeth Barrett, in one of the longest parts ever written...