Word: ferber
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...SUPPOSED to hold a mirror to nature, but when a play sets actors portraying actors, the theater can turn into a house of mirrors. Resonances and multiple entendres give performers a chance to show off and audiences the opportunity to smile knowingly. George Kaufman and Edna Ferber's durable comedy doesn't make too much of this complexity, not nearly as much as some other plays in the genre, like David Mamet's A Life in the Theater. The Royal Family sticks closely to the bustling, three-act comedy formula that Kaufman and his collaborators used in so many...
...days of Sam Houston, who proclaimed: "Texas could exist without the U.S., but the U.S. cannot, except at very great hazard, exist without Texas." Thanks to its flamboyant style of braggadocio, Texas is indeed among the front runners in the American art of blowing hard, excelling in what Edna Ferber called the knack of "confusing bigness with greatness." Yet the truth is that in patrician Boston the chauvinism is just as dependable, and its expression as fulsome, as anywhere, in the Lone Star State. The chauvinist spirit is more polished in Boston but, after all, it was born close...
Kaufman and Ferber have embodied--but never too seriously--this peculiar blend of love and commitment in the figure of the late Aubrey Cavendish, the patriarch of this royal family of the theater, whose portrait hangs high on the wall in the Cavendish living room. The great Aubrey Cavendish never quit. He allowed himself time off from his work only once in his life, after finishing the last performance of his last tour, which was ending that night. He did all four curtain calls and only when the curtain had dropped for the last time did he allow himself...
...strange coincidence that at approximately the same time that Kaufman and Ferber were most vigorously denying any connection between the Cavendishes and the Barrymores, Ethel Barrymore wrote in a manuscript that has never been published in full...
...Royal Family, the brilliant Broadway production of George S. Kaufmann--Edna Ferber play about a flamboyant theater family strangely reminiscent of the Barrymore clan, is playing at the Wilbur Theater, 252 Tremont St., Boston. Performances are Monday through Saturday...