Word: cowards
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Simon's 'Haven't Got Time for the Pain,' and people like it." While Rubins thinks "today's music is good," and considers Laura Nyro "mindblowing," he admits a prejudice: "Nothing is quite up to the 30's and 40's stuff. Nothing can compare with the simplicity of Coward's lyrics." Rubins pauses and sings a few bars from a Noel Coward hit: "My funny valentine, you make me smile with your heart." Short and sweet...
...follow the likes of Coward and Hart has been a dream of many an aspiring songwriter, and Rubins is no exception to the rule: "When I was younger I did want to go to Broadway. Now the basic thing I wanted to do when I was 18 is no longer a fantasy. I know a lot of people in the business." So Rubins will finally leave the womb of Cambridge to seek a living in New York. "I'd be thrilled--thrilled if I could support myself doing anything involving the arts"--and that includes writing songs, teaching acting, writing...
...Coward's Lives is organized in an unusual and precarious manner for a situation comedy: a threadbare plot is sprinkled with "life-lines" (guffaw-inducing one-liners) for the major characters, Elyot Chase and Amanda Prynne, and occassional emergency appearances of the play's idiotic and insufferable secondary characters (Victor Prynne, Sybil Chase, and Louise). The first act introduces the entire plot: Amanda and Elyot, once married and later divorced, fall in love again while honeymooning with their newly found spouses, Victor and Sybil--two cretin-like characters representing the very best in English shallowness. There is no further development...
Arnott, in order to squeeze the maximum wit out of Coward's insipid manuscript, has worked out what appears to be a second-by-second computer program for verbal inflections, facial contortions, physical maneuvers, and furniture kicking. During the extensive arguments and love bouts of Elyot and Amanda, the play's spirited and engaging cynics, the precise sense of timing turns insults, cigarette lighting, and record smashing into high comic art. At times, Arnott's exhaustive direction and his actors' slavish execution reaches self-parody: it is worthwhile, during the course of the play, to study carefully the director...
...Noel Coward himself acted in the London production of Private Lives is the 1930's (as Elyot), and he found it a trying, though successful, experience: "It was more tricky and full of pitfalls than anything I have ever attempted as an actor." Hutson and Lewis, as Elyot and Amanda, are a sharp, strong, and attractive duo who avoid most of Coward's worst pitfalls--abysmal dialogue, kitschy scenes, and trite psychology--and maximize Coward's well hidden strengths--the parody of English manners and social institutions, the art of verbal thrust and counterthrust, the sharp criticism of women...