Word: critics
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Literary Critic Edmund Wilson, dragged unwillingly to Peter Grimes, came away as enthusiastic as everyone else. Wrote he (in his Europe Without Baedeker) : "The opera seizes on you, possesses you, keeps you riveted to your seat during the action and keyed up during the intermissions, and drops you, purged and exhausted, at the end. . . . This opera could have been written in no other age, and it is one of the very few works of art that have seemed to me, so far, to have spoken for the blind anguish, the hateful rancors and the will to destruction of these horrible...
Died. Robert Burns Mantle, 74, retired dean of Manhattan drama critics (his prestigious yearly anthology of Best Plays covers every Broadway season from 1899 to 1947); of cancer; in Forest Hills, L.I. A newspaper typesetter in 1896, Burns Mantle was once unable to decipher a critic's longhand review, wrote one of his own, went on writing reviews until he retired in 1943. A kindly observer who occasionally risked being dull in his efforts to be fair, he advised his Daily News successor that Broadway was his oyster: "Season it with a dash of salt...
...Republic's Drama Critic Irwin Shaw performed an auto-autopsy on his play, The Survivors, which folded after eight performances on Broadway. Following his own advice to drama critics (TIME, March 25, 1946), Critic Shaw was all sympathy: "Somewhere in the middle of rehearsals [the authors†] discovered they wished to rewrite the script almost entirely." But "the theater today has . . . the quality of a conveyor belt [which] moves in an inexorable rhythm toward the set moment at which the finished product must be taken off the line and sold. This may be all very well for an automobile...
...Manchester Guardian sometimes stoops, but always from an Olympian height. A Guardian critic last week reviewed Mae West, who is playing in London in her bawdy, gaudy old Diamond Lil, found the play "one of these perverse and unpredictable successes" and Mae a "Junoesque lady [who] leered out asthmatic innuendoes in scene after scene of ineffable twaddle." On the whole, he liked it-but he was not to be taken in by the plot. "Some of it," he observed, "one seems to have seen before in a film...
...Critic. In St. Johnsbury, Vt., Henry Placey, a woodchopper, finally saw his first "talkie," walked out on it after 15 minutes...