Word: fang
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Better by far is the Tung Fang (meaning Eastern) Hotel hi Canton, China's southernmost big city, the commonest point of entry and sole destination of many Foreign Friends. The Tung Fang is a bustling, 2,000-room place with a new air-conditioned whig. The rooms ($12.50 for a double) are larger, more comfortably furnished, mattressed and ant-less. At the Tung Fang it is even possible to obtain a few ice cubes, and the laundry service is Chinese-immaculate and cheap (a shut well ironed for about 50). The hotel has also recognized...
...rest of the production, though, is quite professional. Louise Newman's costumes, if not sumptuous, are certainly eye-catching, and Ferric Fang's orchestra does justice to the bouncy music. Best of all, the set (designed by Robert Grossman, with hilarious graphic designs by Lee Bearson and Tom Gammill) keeps the audience laughing even when the script is flagging. Like the background in a Mad Magazine cartoon, the French Gothic Palace of Justice offers all sorts of hidden gags, which usually take a while to figure out, but are genuinely worth the effort to decipher. Unfortunately, the lulls...
...always, the acting is superlative. Gazzara's Cosmo catches all the paradoxes and puzzles of the character, the wired ambition and the rapture over doom. Cassavetes' hoodlums, notably Seymour Cassel, are all unfailingly polite. The one exception is Timothy Carey as a fang-toothed, philosophical hood who eats dinner wearing white gloves and likes to quote the great thinkers. Cassel is curious about why Carey declines to fulfill his assignment and kill Gazzara. Carey curls his lips over his gums, lets a little foam drip, and says, "Like Karl Marx said: opium is the religion of the people...
...drama uses no curtain and no change of lighting. The plays are acted with few or no props beyond a fan, which may represent a cup of wine or a deadly weapon. We know, too, that Wilder was deeply affected by seeing the art of Mei Lan-fang when the late Chinese star visited New York and moved many observers to proclaim him the greatest actor in the world. Mei was the supreme master of mime and symbolic gesture, and his dramas made do with the same kind of simple table and straight chairs that the Stage Manager brings...
...Joong Fang Editor, Philosophia Mathematica Norfolk...