Word: casey
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Juno (book by Joseph Stein, music and lyrics by Marc Blitzstein, dances by Agnes de Mille) is a Pyrrhic victory of Broadway talent over an Irish genius. This musical version of Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock paradoxically mutes O'Casey's inner music with song, fetters his soaring spirit with dance, and deflects the lyric flow of his dialogue into prosy pools of talk...
...John Casey, whose part is too complex to explain or care about, is forced--against his better judgment, I hope--to sing. He manages to save his part with some convincing buffoonery, but it is a close call...
...high school French teachers, who are not in all respects exactly like the rest of us. The complicated plot concerns a disreputable lawyer who cheats others and who is himself cheated, and never would intrigue have been less intriguing, except for an excellent actor by the name of John Casey. Mr. Casey sweats not, neither does he strain. He plays the shifty Patelin as one of those people who, when they are not leaning against something, contrive somehow to appear to be leaning against themselves; relaxed, charming, and funny. William D. Gordy has directed a cheerful and reasonably no-sweat...
...spectacle of poor, hard-working Juno Boyle slaving away to support her husband, a strutting "paycock" who spends his days carousing with his crony in the pub. But there isn't. The story of Juno's daughter, Mary, who impregnates and then deserts her, raises the possibility that O'Casey is the arrantest disher-up of unrefurbished cliche who ever presumed to deal in "serious" drama. Only in the account of Juno's son, Johnny, the unwilling informer, do O'Casey and his faithful amanuensis ever succeed in evoking sympathy...
Proceeding, perhaps, on the tenable theory that what they had in hand was a revival of O'Casey's play with occasional interpolated musical numbers, the producers engaged Melvyn Douglas and Shirley Booth to play Captain and Mrs. Boyle. Nothing in their performances compensates for their egregious violation of the rule that he who can't sing, shouldn't. Mr. Douglas at least does a good gruff job on what emerges as a thoroughly nasty character, but Miss Booth, in what should be a congenial role, seems almost uncomfortable; her famous infectious warm-heartedness is unaccountably missing, as well...