Word: cleopatras
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...CAESAR & CLEOPATRA (Caedmon) is more than a little like Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. For the tyrannical pedant of phonetics, Henry Higgins, Shaw substitutes the philosopher-king of Rome. In place of the forlorn flower girl who must be passed off as a lady, the play offers an adolescent Egyptian minx who must be tutored in regality. The playwright's purposes are somewhat thwarted by this recording. Max Adrian is little better than a fashionably tailored verbal dandy, and an overagitated Claire Bloom is more often short of breath than breathless...
...Cleopatra was "at best a major disappointment, at worst an extravagant exercise in tedium. The mountain of notoriety has produced a mouse...
...most difficult part in the play is that of the cat mehitabel (Anne Bernstein), mehitabel is the kind of plucky creature whose realism and illusions are made of identical indestructible fiber. As surely as she recognizes that her guts will soon be fiddle strings, she believes that she was Cleopatra in a previous incarnation. She drowns her children, but in such a charming way. Miss Bernstein's mehitabel is so unambiguous that insights about her seem surprisingly unincisive, but still, her performance is good, for it is both believable and attractive...
...come they slouched through two and a half hours as if the performance were a second run through? How come they had no timing, no pace, no zest? The kindest answer is that the show needs works (South Pacific's been afflicted with almost as many unforeseen difficulties as Cleopatra) and there can be no doubt that next weekend, when the cast feels more secure, it will be a damn sight more entertaining...
...Binding. Anhalt and his wife split up after finishing The Pride and the Passion. But on his own, the talented wordsmith has stayed in constant demand. He finished The Young Lions ("by actual account, it was the fourteenth attempt by nine writers"), struck out on Walter Wanger's Cleopatra after nine days, but made good with Not as a Stranger, an almost textbook example of Anhalt's method...