Word: cowardly
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...think she has died. But the subplot, in which Hero's cousin Beatrice and Claudio's friend Benedick talk themselves out of and then into love, served up a sexual set-to whose rapier eloquence has inspired just about every British playwright of manners from Congreve to Coward and beyond. While Hero and Claudio played out their fustian collision of chivalry and jealousy at center court, Beatrice and Benedick stood on the sidelines, exchanged waspish badinage and transformed supporting roles into star turns. This time around, Sinead Cusack (who need no longer be known only as Mrs. Jeremy...
...even as a child, though I came from a very poor family. But there have been times when the lure of the zeros was simply too great." It may have been those seductive zeros that reunited him with Taylor last year in a national tour of Noël Coward's Private Lives; each reportedly was paid $70,000 a week. Grotesquely miscast, Liz and Dick endured perhaps their ultimate humiliation...
DESIGN FOR LIVING by Noël Coward...
...Coward made mock of many social dogmas, but he was a true believer in the imperium of style. Those who had the divine spark got to ride through life on a silk cushion, inventing their own rules and then ignoring them, cutting the boorish infidels down with gay, rapier wit. Thus it is with the merrily amoral ménage in Design for Living, a triangle with some complex emotional geometry. Otto (Frank Langella) and Leo (Raul Julia) are friends; Gilda (Jill Clayburgh) and Otto become lovers; Gilda dumps Otto for Leo; Gilda leaves them both for a stuffy...
...revival at the Circle in the Square Theater, the first Broadway mounting of Design for Living since its 1933 premiere, refuses to tiptoe. Instead it galumphs, on thundering rhino feet, at the pitch and tempo of farce. Frenzy worked fine for Director George C. Scott in his production of Coward's Present Laughter two years ago. Not so here, where the bonhomie is so forced that it comes across as bullying. Though Langella and Julia occasionally mine the text for subterranean veins of grace and melancholy, Clayburgh storms about with the booming baritone and great-lady gestures...