Word: cowardly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sophisticate's sophisticate, Porter was perhaps the closest U.S. equivalent to Noël Coward, yet not quite his equal. Though Porter was a wily wizard of rhyme, he lacked some of the inventive fun of Coward's lines. Despite Porter's infatuation with what he called the "rich-rich," he is less intercontinental than Coward. His true territorial imperative was Broadway. The propellent force in his songs is to reach and grab a New York audience. In this production, the women clearly outshine the men. Each has a distinct personality in manner and voice. Maureen Moore...
When Mao was under stress, he would sometimes take his troubles out on her. Once, when the Nationalists had started bombing the Communist strongholds in Yenan, she reported to him that his own aides were afraid. "You are a coward!" he snarled at her. Strain sometimes was caused by their strikingly different backgrounds. She was a city girl. Mao came from a well-to-do peasant family, and rebelled against his conservative father-whom, as Chiang Ch'ing recalled, Mao would still curse even when he was in his seventies...
...then the play has flashes of what it might have been. The first scene, where husband, wife and wife's lover trade epigrams, has some of the flavor of the early Noel Coward-without, unfortunately, Coward's fine, glyptic phrasing. Describing an earthquake that has just killed 20 million Italians, Wintermouth mourns "Poor Italy. Shaped like a boot, and the heel fell off." Madeline Kahn, however, can make even the most ordinary lines sound like Coward...
Director Ed Berman moves the evening along with stopwatch precision. Because of his gift for parody and incessant wordplay, Stoppard's own affinity may be not so much with Wilde and Coward as with S.J. Perelman, a writer whom he greatly admires...
Gilmore repeated his earlier charge that Governor Calvin Rampton was a "moral coward" for staying his execution last month. As for the others who wanted to speak in his defense-the witnesses at the hearing included a right-to-life housewife and a vociferous representative of the Citizens Against Pornography and Other Crimes Committee -Gilmore was equally blunt: "All I have to say to all of them-the rabbis, the priests, the A.C.L.U.-I'd like them to butt out. It's my life and my death...