Word: conceited
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...mild comic conceit at best, and time has made the resulting camouflage and persiflage dimly dispiriting. In 1936, Russia was remotely terrible but not dangerous, still exotic enough for period romance and period humor, attitudes no 1963 playgoer can sustain. Tovarich needed a boldly inventive face lifting, but its book and lyrics sadly sag. Its tune-shy music may please any metronomes in the audience. Sample wit: "Let's go down to the kitchen and get a potato and make our own vodka." Sample lyric...
...uncritically generous-at birth, any little quarterly could count on a blurb and a bouquet of free poems as a present from him. He had no vanity, no avarice, no conceit, but he had strong and angry flashes of pride that described him perfectly in his poet's pose...
...novelty of the play wears more slowly but less well. It is Ustinov's clever conceit to do a kind of drawing-room philosopher's Ages of Man: Old Sam (Ustinov) at 80 is confronted with himself at 60, 40, 20, and even as a baby. The four grown Sams share the stage together, and with all the amusing ironies of hindsight and foreknowledge relive key episodes in their communal life. Sam at 20 (John Horton) is an ardent lyric poet and marathon runner, at 40 (Donald Davis) a disgruntled fictional crafts man of obscure worst-sellers...
...been training in vaudeville for years; maybe the mechanicals don't laugh hard enough at those gay old parochial Elizabethan jokes abous syphilis and sonnets, but their sense of timing and horseplay is just superb. Terry Malick's Bottom, who "gleeks on occasion" with wonderfully oafish conceit, and Philip Traci's absurdly studied Quince are the true leaders of this lot, and a grining David Riggs makes an enchanting Thisby in the interlude...
...review of the musical, Howard Taubman of the New York Times said, Mr. Segal can turn out sparkling lines, all of conceit and interesting rhymes.... Through Mr. Segal and Mr. Raposo he new Harvard generation may move into Broadway as authoritatively as its predecessors swarmed into Washington." The New Yorker called the show "a refreshing musical comedy" with its beater critic Edith Oliver adding. "What found irresistible was the music--sometimes like early, what-the-hell Dodgers, sometimes like early happy-go-lucky Loesser, sometimes like a parody of later inspirational Rodgers...