Word: casted
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most momentous votes in this session of Congress, and the outcome was excruciatingly uncertain until the very last minute. Nearly every member-413 out of 435-turned up to cast a vote on President Carter's request to end the 42 month-old U.S. embargo on arms for Turkey. The ban had infuriated the Turks and weakened the southern flank of NATO. Whether or not Carter would succeed in persuading Congress to lift the embargo was seen as a major test for his Administration...
...cast is large and talented. Thomas Hulce (the class "wimp"), Stephen Furst (the class "blimp"), James Daughton (a BMOC of ambiguous sexuality) and Karen Allen (as the sexiest of the animals' girls) are much more subtle performers than the material demands. Donald Sutherland, playing Faber's obligatory pot-smoking English prof, and Verna Bloom, as the dean's alcoholic wife, score some wicked points against the postgraduate generation...
...LOEB PRODUCTION of the play does justice to Wycherly's satire, and in general the performers make the most of the barb-tongued dialogue. Director Norman Ayrton has captured the stylized nature of Wycherly's society in the highly stylized but rarely obtrusive things he has his cast do. Touches like the ladies' fans, which they snap open and shut in precise timing with their lines, and the gestures of the fops and dandies underscore the contrived nature of the life Wycherly satirizes. In the first scene, everyone who walks on stage stops to preen in a full-length mirror...
...supporting cast is also, by and large, excellent. Dan Strickler as Fidget is a perfectly dotty old lord (though he is upstaged by the pug Pekinese he carries onstage), and Peter Haydu shines as the mincing fop, Sparkish...
...fortunate, too, that the Loeb cast is so accomplished, because Wycherly's jokes have a tendency to fall flat on a 20th century audience. Almost nobody in the audience got the humor in the repeated references (i.e. Horner's name) to horns, cuckolds and the like, which is not so much a comment on their ignorance as an example of the changes in humor over 300 years. Cuckold jokes were a scream in 1675, but they are an anachronism now. Moreover, words don't mean the same things now as they did then. When Sparkish calls Horner "the sign...