Word: com
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...comedian asked his straight man to read the day's news. "They had tea together again," intoned the other. But back of the little jokes and the large admonitions, a disquieting uncertainty hung over the nation. Nobody in Britain expected that the Princess' romance with her divorced com moner would end in the collapse of the British throne, or believed that it could cause more than a passing disruption in Anthony Eden's government. What it could do, and had perhaps already done, was to damage a faith already weakened by repeated blows...
...Bourgeois Sentilhomme (by Molière) was the opening bill of a momentous Broadway engagement; for the first time in its illustrious 275-year history, the Comédie Françise was performing (in French) on U.S. soil. It was fitting that the Comédie should raise its first Broad way curtain on something by France's most famous playwright; it was, on the whole, wise that it chose from Molière something so relatively familiar and so lightly entertaining as Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Far from the great Molière of Le Misanthrope, Le Bourgeois...
Molière's joking is broad, but his character sense is broad-bottomed; somehow, though M. Jourdain's head swims with wild delusions, his clumsy feet stay on the ground. And the Comédie Franchise's Louis Seigner keeps him that way, makes him seem human while remaining idiotic, and so childish as to be likable. Actor Seigner's would-be gentleman becomes a solid center round which revolve a succession of sideshows...
...sideshow nature of the play* makes possible a diversity of insights into the Comédie's methods of production. If much is traditional and even ritualistic, very little seems petrified. In view of interspersed high slapstick of dancing and singing and fencing masters, of ostentatious banquet scenes and staircase serenades, of a Turkish fandango suggesting fraternal-order shenanigans. Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme becomes a varied though lengthy evening. Despite its measure of real low comedy, it retains a kind of ballet air. There is something ceremonious as well as earthy in its laughter, and a pinch of period charm...
Local Gain. Until World War II, Sicily contributed far more to Italy than Italy ever gave back. "They grow fat up north with our money," is an old Sicilian com plaint. But in its postwar autonomy, Res tivo and his colleagues are able to claim, Sicily has got 8,500 new schoolrooms, 3,026 kilometers of sorely needed new roads, 131,000 rooms of new housing, a new water system for 247 communities. Total investment by Rome and the regional government in eight years: about $1.5 billion. Tourist business is booming (helped among other things by the visit to ancient...