Word: cleopatras
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CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA...
Caesar and Cleopatra is afflicted by the mummy's curse. Despite two or three of the best scenes in the Shavian canon, the play itself may be unworkable: lines by Shaw but construction by Rube Goldberg. Offstage there are battles, mob scenes and the endless clumping of Roman legions. Onstage there are only words; even in this finger exercise for Pygmalion Shaw seemed to be heading toward what he later called playwriting as a "platonic exercise...
...imaginative production might have rescued the good and masked the bad in this 80-year-old drama. Director Ellis Rabb reverses that equation, how ever; his Caesar and Cleopatra is as dull as it is dutiful. Scenes change with astonishing rapidity, but the action seems regulated by an hourglass - an illusion whose secret is best left with Rabb and the Sphinx. Ironically, the one liberty the director has taken, a vigorous pruning to keep the play within two hours, makes Shaw's needlessly complicated plot simply baffling...
Sumptuous sounded more accurate to me. Powerful. "Cleopatra," "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" and "Reflections in a Golden Eye" where she takes a whip to Brando's face. There were times when she'd made us squirm, uncomfortable with the guts of her performance, shown us the violent capacity of human emotions...
SUMPTUOUS in her public persona as well. Husbands, husbands, husbands--no man could control her energy; not this Cleopatra. Diamonds, bigger diamonds, romances, affairs, riots and more adorned her every step. We knew all about it. Time, Newsweek, People, CBS, The National Enquirer and The New York Times had told us so. We listened to the vulgar details for the same reason we watched her on the screen. She is excess. She exploits extremes of love and hate and self-adornment. She articulates those feelings inside us and pushes them to their extremes. Intensity: we love it and we need...