Word: caseys
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...sudden, violent switch of emotional tone, the ironic play on the tension between gaiety and sorrow, are typical of O'Casey, and their effect is heightened by Marc Blitzstein's music and Anges de Mille's choreography. Tommy Rall does the informer's dance with what looks like incredible virtuosity. The incident is milked a little too heavily, but it works...
...sleaziness and greasiness which still stain most musicals. The major trouble is book trouble: Joseph Stein's script, with its long scenes of aimless small talk taken largely intact from the play, is a monument to misguided fidelity. Mr. Stein has already been chewed out by O'Casey's admirers for associating himself with a huge job of lily-gilding. It seems to me, on the contrary, that what Juno needs is fewer drab, limp petals, and more bright fresh gilt...
...Casey derives his humor from bare-faced lying, brazen self-contradiction and other forms of impudence, chutzpah, and general damned cheek on the part of his characters. These are old theatrical devices; O'Casey handles them crudely, and Mr. Stein can think of no improvements...
...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...