Word: chekhovs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Bert Lytell gives a savory performance as the ham and Evelyn Varden is comic as the fat directrix of the players who rehearses to the refrain of "Nuts in May, nuts in May!" a dance intended to enliven one of the morbid dramas of Chekhov. But as a whole this supposedly sparkling little vehicle by the author of the 1934 comedy hit Personal Appearance gives off about as much electricity as a horse...
...distance autopsies are risky. French Scholar Denis Saurat enraged the high-minded by "demonstrating" that blind John Milton (like deaf Ludwig van Beethoven) suffered from hereditary syphilis. Diagnostician Moorman finds Milton tuberculous. Other famous consumptives: Pope, Dr. Johnson, Shelley, Goethe, Schiller, Descartes, Balzac, Rousseau, Spinoza, Kant, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Chekhov, Dostoevski, a brow-wrinkling list of other writers and thinkers. Doctors suspect that tuberculosis develops genius because 1) apprehension of death inspires a burning awareness of life's beauty, significance, transience, 2) the bacillus breeds restlessness and an intoxicated hypersensitiveness...
...every one of Vag's favorites among the modern dramatists, but poor Vag has been uncomfortable through them all. Brown has waxed witty on Shaw and on Shirley Temple; he has coined (or quoted) sparkling epigrams--the kind that Vag, himself coins (or quotes) in his day-dreams--on Chekhov and on Mrs. Roosevelt. But through it all Vag has sat disconsolate. A smile now and then has crossed his face, but he hasn't laughed outright more than twice...
Five minutes early for the Chekhov lecture, Vag got a choice seat on the floor with his knees doubled up under him. He thought more about Buddha than "The Cherry Orchard" that night. Then he pulled in at a quarter before the hour to hear the one-man debate on Barrie vs. Galsworthy and sat in great discomfort on a window ledge...
...turning Night Music into the same kind of Saroyanesque carnival. Mr. Odets may well find this change of tune a little confusing. But while basking in his brave new world he may also find it worth thinking about that he, who in the past was always being compared to Chekhov, is now being compared to Saroyan...