Word: cowardly
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...born nine days before Christmas, so his mother named him Noël. That festive holiday spirit swirled around Noël Coward and his works throughout his life. His plays, musicals, and revues were marvelous parties. To the tinkle of cocktail glasses, he arched the languid magic wand of his cigarette holder and summoned up clever, dashing men and svelte, seductive women who danced divinely, sang bittersweetly and tottered into the tinseled dawn. None of it was remotely real, but it was often great fun, and that suited Coward perfectly to the very day the party ended last week...
Faith. The talent was virtually parthenogenetic, since there was no theatrical tradition on either side of his family. His father was a piano salesman who eked out a precarious living. His mother played the piano passably, and Coward acknowledged that he was linked to her with "an umbilical cord of piano wire." By the time Noël donned his first childish sailor suit, Mrs. Coward had discovered her vocation: stage mother. The average mother is content to believe that her son is bright; the stage mother has a fanatical conviction that her son is a genius. With no discernible...
...misty-eyed romantic, starlight-in-champagne (I'll Follow My Secret Heart, Zigeuner, Someday I'll Find You). The other group pinches a satiric nerve with droll spoofery (Mad Dogs and Englishmen, Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington). As a lyricist, Coward was a direct descendant of W.S. Gilbert, and in the modern musical theater only Lorenz Hart and Cole Porter were his peers...
...HIMSELF AND HIS JOB: "It is very hard, but I like it very much. One must think and not be a coward. Very many Africans have written to me that I am a hero of Africa. This makes me very proud...
...Vienna than the Scandinavian north, but why carp? In a show almost without choreography, Sondheim's lyrics are nimble-wilted dances. Literate, ironic, playful, enviably clever, altogether professional, Stephen Sondheim is a quicksilver wordsmith in the grand tradition of Cole Porter, Noel Coward and Lorenz Hart. There are three standout numbers. One is Liaisons (Gingold), a lament that courtesans are not the elegantly larcenous creatures they used to be. Equally arresting are Send In the Clowns (Johns), a rueful gaze into the cracked mirror of the middle years, and The Miller's Son (Jamin-Bartlett), a gath...