Word: dialects
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Pygmalion. G. B. Shaw's sage play with a wink is enjoying flawless production at the Guild Theatre. Under Philip Moeller's direction, it emerges a dramatic symphony. Lynn Fontanne (who spent her summer in London picking up a cockney dialect and wardrobe) plays the wild specimen of the slums. Henry Travers is her ragged parent with Shavian grievances against middle-class morality. Together with Beryl Mercer as a simple housekeeper who understands women better than the celebrated bachelor scientists, they offer as fine a performance as the Guild or any other organization, can boast for this season...
...second act, shunted in bodily from the vaudeville circuit, consists of a classroom scene, leaves the slight plot snoozing at practically the same complication it had reached when the curtain crept down on Act I. The audience was quick to appreciate that vaudeville interpolation. More than a series of dialect jokes is the picture of Life's graduating seniors entering the Freshman class of night school in order to fill the gaping rift between Old and New World customs with a little pitifully mastered book-knowledge, in order to understand the foreign ways of their own U.S.-born children...
Fondly musing on the early days of football Mike said in his inimitable Hibernian dialect, which we dare not attempt to transliterate...
...three volumes of poems left for posthumous publication by Amy Lowell is as impersonal as the first volume (What's O'Clock?, 1925) was personal. It contains 13 narratives, mostly in the free, conversational verse that Miss Lowell adapted as a net to catch the crabbed dialect of her much-cherished New England. That dialect imposed restrictions upon her crystalline and pyrotechnic fancy, but only in the matter of actual words. When a New Englander needs an image for swarming bees he may not bethink him of showered stars, yet sparks from a Fourth of July pinwheel...
...that phonograph owners everywhere have lately been buying eagerly in record form, sung and played in faithful dialect for the Columbia Company...