Word: casts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...thoroughly reactionary mind, and a nagging weakness for the most squalidly dull-thud variety of pun. Both these latter qualities are prominently on display in Princess Ida. Moreover, some mad infatuation (something, perhaps, to do with the Tennyson poem of which Ida is a parody) led him to cast the thing in blank verse, of the sort Shaw must have had in mind when he said that blank verse was easier to write than prose. On the other hand, Gilbert was a master of his own peculiar medium, and between the gaps there is some pretty good stuff...
...story takes place in 1921, in a rural Greek village under Turkish domination, a town which has chosen from its populace a cast for the septennial Passion play: a Jesus, and a Peter, James, John, Judas and Mary Magdelan. The play itself never gets produced, but the characters, from the moments they are chosen, find themselves beginning to play their roles in real life...
Ultimately, the story revolves around Manolios' effect on other people. With such a subject, the best description is indirect. Beside the dramatic use of crowds, Dassin traces individual characters. Although the entire cast performs laudably, the roles of Mary Magdelan and that of the Turkish Agha deserve special note, both for themselves and for the skill with which they are filled. The former experiences fully and convincingly the joys of virtue and of vice; the latter commits himself to detachment. Were his portrait drawn with less sympathy, a criticism of the Turk's detachment might be the biggest single answer...
Sick, Sick, Sick is for the most part realistic, personal, homely; cast in monologue (interior and exterior) and dialogue; set largely in offices, coffee houses, bars, apartments. But in Passionella, the shy young men, the pony-tailed girls, the woman who sings folksongs "in the original ethnic," the man who says, "What I wouldn't give to be a conformist like all those others," are replaced by a "friendly neighborhood godmother come [by way of a television set] to bring you the answer to your most cherished dreams," and by little Munro, who was drafted into the army...
...prizefight manager, the private eye, the top sergeant or the political crony in scores of films, from Here Comes Mr. Jordan to The Last Hurrah, onetime Broadway playwright who hit the big time in 1925 with Is Zat So? (618 performances), later wrote plays with fat cast lists in order to provide work for actors; of chronic asthma; in Hollywood...