Word: druten
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...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...
...enchanting Madwoman of Chaillot flourished. Musically, 1948-49 could point with pride to Kiss Me, Kate as well as South Pacific; but, to only one enjoyable revue, Lend an Ear. It was a season when the mourners' bench was lined with Tennessee Williams, Clifford Odets, John van Druten, Kaufman & Ferber, Garson Kanin, Marc Connelly...
Make Way for Lucia (by John van Druten, based on E. F. Benson's novels; produced by the Theatre Guild) tells of a showoff English widow (Isabel Jeans) who settles down for the summer of 1912 in a buzzing English village. Christened Emmeline but always called Lu-chee-a, she also affects gaily soulful garments, ostentatiously moves from the easel to the pianoforte, dabbles in Italian, and occasionally drops into baby talk...
...double exposure of the precious and the provincial, a caricature of manners and a comedy of airs, Make Way for Lucia is as full of gentility and small jabs as an old-fashioned pin cushion. Some of it is pleasant fun; virtually all of it gains from Mr. van Druten's deft and mannerly use of E. F. Benson's yellowing Lucia novels, and from the amusing exaggerations of a capable cast. What cuts down on the fun in Lucia is the too-great sameness of the cutting-up. The fun itself tends to be pretty thin...