Word: cowards
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...plays and musicals ranged over Coward's entire spectrum of talent and taste from the faintly wicked ménage à trois of Design for Living to the spectral fantasy of Blithe Spirit, from whipped cream operettas like Bitter-Sweet to music hall antics like Tonight at 8:30 (with Gertrude Lawrence) from Kiplingesque tunes of glory in Cavalcade to the hilarious battle royal of the sexes, Private Lives. In the film Brief Encounter, Coward even dropped his customary mask of urbane detachment to record a tenderly poignant tale of middle-aged love...
...shaper of the flippant, disenchanted '20s, Coward was wary of the deeper emotions, guardedly dispassionate, compulsively irreverent. He turned the era's alienated mood into a frenetic jazz beat of syncopated escapism. The message: Live for the moment, dance your troubles away, play madder music, drink stronger wine...
...technical counterpart of this in Coward's plays is that he vastly speeded up the tempo of comedy. Relying on single lines of dialogue, he produced instant repartee in which talk became a blindingly fast game of inflective one-upmanship rather than a declaration of meaning or a display of passion. Even within individual lines, he inserted a word or phrase that mockingly deflated the emotion it expressed. Thus Elyot says to Amanda in Private Lives: "You're looking very lovely in this damned moonlight, Amanda." Repeated time and again, this approach almost makes Coward the granddaddy...