Word: cleopatras
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...loudly trumpeted musicals, Allegro and Inside U.S.A., reached Broadway with $500,000 or more already in the till; but far more modest musicals like Make Mine Manhattan and Angel in the Wings proved much better fun. The classics provided some rewarding evenings (Medea, Antony and Cleopatra, The Alchemist) and there was enough Shaw for a minor festival...
...very often that a Shakespeare revival gets as high praise as Katherine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic's "Antony and Cleopatra." Reading the superlatives leaves anyone acquainted with Shakespeare or with acting standards in a quandary after he sees the play: how can he reconcile the rave reviews with the obvious and fatal shortcomings of the current production...
Miss Cornell is the biggest disappointment of the evening. She seems temperamentally unable to express the corrupting sensuality of Cleopatra, or her intrinsic failure to see life from a consistent or serious point of view. She throws away good lines, looks foolish when she tries to act silky, and frequently seems lost in the part, In her biggest dramatic scenes she turns her role from an illusion to a mass of words by forcing her voice and manner. Miss Cornell's tricks and gestures, effective in other roles, show her in this supreme part as not a great tragic actress...
Perhaps, despite the inadequate cast in this production, the problems of "Antony and Cleopatra" are too much for the stage. Perhaps it will be up to a super-colossal cast in a super-colossal, non-stagebound movie to achieve the really satisfactory version of this masterpiece that three and one-half centuries on the stage have failed to produce...
...Oedipus. 3. Caesar and Cleopatra...