Word: druten
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...show's distinguished ancestry includes Kathryn Forbes's bestselling novel, Mama's Bank Account, John van Druten's Broadway hit, I Remember Mama, and the movie based on the play. But Producer Irwin and Director Ralph Nelson have not borrowed a single episode from the play and novel. They prefer to concentrate on the basic characters, the locale (San Francisco) and the period (early 1900s). Since the program started, there has been only one major cast change. A spare kinescope (television recording), kept handy in case one of the principals should be taken ill, has never...
Bell, Book and Candle (by John van Druten; produced by Irene Mayer Selznick) comes up with a bright comedy idea and, for perhaps better than half the evening, with a bright comedy. Playwright van Druten has assumed not only that there are modern-day witches but that they can be modish and highly efficient, and that one of them is attractive enough to ensnare a bright Manhattan publisher. When the publisher discovers she is a witch, he walks out on her-only for her to discover she is now a woman. Hoist on her own broomstick, she has fallen...
...Druten perfectly engineers the leap into fantasy. With their shop talk and trade secrets, his witches and warlocks are as conceivable as they are entertaining, and his heroine, both before & after, makes a lively minx. Gradually, however, the social and business life of witches is dulled by repetition; eventually the odd charm of boy-meets-witch slumps into the old hat of boy-finds-girl. Bell, Book and Candle lacks the resourceful twists that kept a fantasy like Blithe Spirit gay to the end; it moves in the opposite-and less rewarding-direction of a fantasy like Lady into...
...Holroyds are a charming family who live in the Murray Hill district of New York, and one can hardly hold it against them that they are all either witches or warlocks. Author John van Druten is preoccupied with this interesting aspect of their private lives, and he manages to evoke the same morbid curiosity in the audience throughout the course of three acts...
...situations and characters than because of any sparkling writing. At that point, however, the author becomes carried away by the on and offstage witchery. Toward the end, the play assumes the quality of a poor Charles Addams cartoon. A good deal of the enchantment has gone from van Druten's hocus-pocus...