Word: countesses
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...dramatized version of the biblical Golden Rule, set as a costume piece during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. The protagonist of the play is a brash but cowardly deserter from the Hungarian army who takes refuge in the home of his former mother-in-law. That lady, a countess and sort of philosophical fairy godmother, teaches him what he should have learned in Sunday school and provides him with a brand new backbone...
...Countess, Katharine Cornell can well be described as wonderful. Filled with charm and kindness, her performance at the same time reveals the inner strength of the woman she portrays. Her reading of Fry's complicated sentences is clear enough to reach even the hidden recesses of the second balcony, but it somehow never sounds declamatory or too loud. Miss Cornell's presence on the stage is so overwhelming, in fact, that the other actors sometimes succumb to the temptation to shout in order to make an equal impact on the audience. This defect is most noticeable in the performance...
...reduced to one dimension," has nowhere been raised to even two. Indeed, the cardboard flatness of Fry's scoundrel almost foredooms the play as drama. And Tyrone Power acts him with forthright but misguided vigor: what the part needs is sinuousness and style. For the serenities of the countess, Katharine Cornell's personal graciousness is more in accord...
...Valerie Bettis and Cathleen Nesbitt waged an exciting conflict for domination of the manless stage. A few of the more trenchant lines were dropped from the TV version of the play, and Paulette Goddard and Mary Boland seemed miscast as the viper-tongued Sylvia Fowler and the gigolo-collecting Countess de Lage...
...Opera Theater's singers are competent, and some considerably better. Mac Morgan, James Joyce, and Robert Mesrobian sing and act The Barber with magnificent style; Adele Addision's Countess combines a marked dramatic talent with vocal beauty that is easily outstanding among American sopranos...