Word: dickensian
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...scene is a tawdry section of Dickensian London. The characters are dregs of the town, led by an enterpriser named Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum, who has managed to organize beggary and make it pay, and one Macheath, thief and trollopmonger. ("Sloppy Sadie was discovered/ With a knife-wound up her thigh/ And Macheath strolls down on Dock Street/ Looking dreamy...
...pace; the moviegoer, continuously aware that the vehicle is trying to beat the clock, may begin to feel like getting out to push. At 119 minutes, this might have been a much better movie than it is at 109. Yet the direction, by Noel Langley, has a real Dickensian rollick, and the acting is stylish, if not brilliant caricature. James Hayter is a dear old tub as Pickwick; Nigel Patrick, as Jingle, makes a properly swagger cheapJack; and Comedienne Joyce Grenfell, as Mrs. Leo Hunter, the aristocratic wreck who holds the "literahry fawncy-dress breakfast," positively improves on the book...
...Widow Bardell's breach-of-promise suit, Mr. Pickwick (George Howe) counts for much more on the stage than he does in the book. This means-and it is the measure of where Dickens suffers most-that Mr. Pickwick counts for much more than his gloriously Dickensian servant, Sam Weller. The trial scene, too, though it is made the climax of the evening, has been shorn of its full comic grandeur, with Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz's appearance in it all too brief. But Stiggins, the red-nosed parson, and Jingle and Mrs. Leo Hunter and many others have...
Last year Playwright-Actor Emlyn (Night Must Fall) Williams, a rabid Dickensian, got the idea, not just of repeating the Dickens readings, but of impersonating the author-clothes, whiskers and all. A hit in London, Williams-like Dickens-began a U.S. tour in Boston, last week reached Manhattan. His success on Broadway was more than a stunt: it neatly blended novelty with nostalgia, proved Dickens to be a "dramatic" novelist, Williams to be a colorful Dickens in a studiously varied program...
...Williams of course did not actually read from the books. He flowed effortlessly over the grotesque, oddly-shaped lumps that are Dickensian prose, and he languished nostalgically with the magical Dickensian names, which are so much moreconnotative than denotative: "Mr. Podsnap," "Mr. Bob Sawyer," "Mr. Chops," "Monseigneur." He literally threw himself into the performance, with movements and gestures which seemed just what the author intended, and his voices were superb, whether he was the narrator, the young fop, the chauvinistic Englishman, the crotchety landlady, the Marquis, or the signal...