Word: crickets
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...Month Club judge, author of The Lifetime Reading Plan), Fadiman has now set out to hook the grade-school crowd. From his hilltop home in Santa Barbara, where he is also preparing a critical history of children's literature, Fadiman is editing a brisk new magazine called Cricket...
Billed as the first literary magazine for children since the famed St. Nicholas faded away in the '30s, Cricket (price: $1.25 per issue) mercifully does not talk down to its readers. It offers a good range of literate, mind-widening material-fairy tales, poems, tongue twisters, articles on space and sport. Illustrations are mostly in black and white. "There is no substitute for the written word and the well-drawn line," says Fadiman. "We want Cricket to act as a neutralizer against the cheap, the sensational and the violent...
...Rogue's Trial have an intense need for mercy. The Church, represented by a bishop, a priest, and a sacristan, is responsive only to the needs of the rich, personified by Antonio Morris (Frank Gerold) who claims to be "maintaining the ancient leisure of the nobleman." Workers John Cricket and Chico, (Tom Wright and Felipe Michael Noguera) are exploited and abused by their masters, the baker and his wife (Carlo Rizzo and Patricia Dougan), and all of the characters are robbed by bandits...
...much-maligned, outspoken, picaresque hero, John Cricket, attempts to deceive anyone and everyone, including, at the time of his last judgement, Satan, God and the Virgin Mary. "Necessity is an excuse for anything," he says, expressing the general morality of the play...
...especially unfortunate that nothing more was done by Wright in his lead portrayal of Cricket. His lines fail miserably: they are shouted past the person to whom they are directed or delivered with the ingenuousness of Mary Martin's Peter Pan. Tom Wright is a capable actor. When called upon in the course of the play to imitate other characters, he does so admirably. His own character, however, lacks vitality and creativity...