Word: comic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE. No one expects a new comic writer to be another Neil Simon or Jean Kerr. But one does expect him to be funny and to be himself. Leonard Gershe is only sporadically funny and never uniquely himself. But Eileen Heckart, playing the mother of a blind young man who seeks independence by moving into his own apartment, delivers her lines almost as if Gershe had delivered the goods...
...SECRET OF SANTA VITTORIA. Anthony Quinn reaches comic-opera stature as the roistering, boozy Bombolini, who becomes the town's hero as he cons the invading Germans out of nearly 1,000,000 bottles of vermouth. Anna Magnani as Rosa, his strong-willed wife, proves every bit the match for Bombolini-not to mention the Nazis...
...Happy Now? may not be autobiographical, but it has the indelible sound of private experience. His play belongs among the most perceptive portrayals of the son-father relationship that have been brought to the stage. Its special quality is that it is an Oedipal farce, zany, effervescently comic and full of as many crazy laughs as a clock has ticks...
...Caius is a French physician in the play whose accents, mannerisms and character are constantly ridiculed, and whose energy is one of the play's driving comic forces. He had a habit, selon Terry Hands, the director, of kissing those he presumed to be his friends on both checks. The trouble was that all his friends were Englishmen, or normal height, and he was about 4'10". Hence to reach each check he had to hop, and his helloes and good-byes became increasingly more hilarious sight gags...
...both the parts and the whole in The Winter's Tale which was almost perfectly realized in this production. I have mentioned the most clearly molded transition of the play: this was carried off with brilliance: the first and second major parts, roughly defined as the tragic and the comic, blended into a whole which was exquisitely forceful...