Word: falstaffian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...play is, of course, Mrs. Alving, but as Anne Miner portrays her she is constrained almost to the point of inarticulateness. In the minor roles, Lisa Commager (the Alving's maid) is beautiful and occasionally quite good, while Laurence Jacobs often misinterprets the character of Jacob Engstrand, a Falstaffian carpenter...
George Rose's booming and Falstaffian Dogberry was definitive. Hurd Hatfield was perfectly cast as the villainous Don John, and Micheal MacLiammoir was a laudable Don Pedro. In several of the other roles, especially female, the performers were not up to Gielgud's demands...
Puntila is supposed to be a fine Falstaffian fellow when drunk, (he is usually drunk): ready to use his money and power to satisfy the human and animal urges of himself and his friends. It is only during his "attacks" of sobriety that he becomes cold, hard, selfish, and nasty--or, in a word, capitalistic. "Everybody gets along with Puntila," mutters Puntila, potted--but his drunk scenes are written in a vein of repetitive, magniloquent slobbery that makes him more unpleasant drunk than sober...
...baton at first seemed to wave in a rhythm unconnected with the New York Philharmonic's. But after a brief edginess in the opening work, he drove the Philharmonic through Ralph Vaughan Williams' bubbling Symphony No. 8 and made the music chortle, brag, sneer and guffaw with Falstaffian humor in a sheer triumph of spirit. At the end, the audience gave him as warm an ovation as has been heard in Carnegie this year. After 15 years Sir John Barbirolli was back on the podium he had first mounted in 1936 as a bouncy, black-tressed newcomer...
...mammalian ellipses," is divided into two slender young beauties named Lee Remick and Joanne Woodward-but Woodward plays her part with a fire and grace not often seen in a movie queen. And old Will Varner, "thin as a fence rail and almost as long," is transmogrified into the Falstaffian figure of Orson Welles -but Welles, in the first role he has done for Hollywood since Moby Dick, demonstrates decisively that if in the meantime he has scarcely improved as an actor, he is in any case a whale of an entertainer, even when he overacts and over-accents...