Word: fin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Nothing lends the show quite so much strength as Stephen Sondheim's score. It is a beauty, his best yet in an exceedingly distinguished career. The prevailing waltz meter is more suggestive of fin de siècle Vienna than the Scandinavian north, but why carp? In a show almost without choreography, Sondheim's lyrics are nimble-wilted dances. Literate, ironic, playful, enviably clever, altogether professional, Stephen Sondheim is a quicksilver wordsmith in the grand tradition of Cole Porter, Noel Coward and Lorenz Hart. There are three standout numbers. One is Liaisons (Gingold), a lament that courtesans...
...horrifying image recurrently surfaced in her mind during introductory work on a novel, or at the end of a piece. Bell notices that "the fin rising on a wide bland sea," was both a signal of disaster and an admonition that new ideas for another novel were quickening within her subconscious. Virginia's creative ordeal involved such personal expense that Leonard in 1936 was certain if he had not lied to her that The Years was her greatest book, she would have committed suicide...
...without endangering the species. Officially, the International Whaling Commission is supposed to preserve the species by setting quotas, but the organization has no effective enforcement power, and it routinely sets quotas that will satisfy the major whaling nations. Japan has the right to catch 15,700 sperm, sei and fin whales this year, almost half the world total (the few remaining blues and humpbacks are now "protected"). Last spring, the U.S. and Japan made a separate arrangement for the U.S. to monitor Japanese catches, but even now the U.S. observers will see only about 3,000 of the dead whales...
...mainspring of the play's action is provided by the return of Irene. Shadowed by an ever-vigilant nun who is part fury, part mad-house attendant, Irene drifts back into Rubek's life with ghostly grace. Now art and life play out their conflict in the best fin de siecle fashion: while Rubek and Irene seek to regain both life and the past in a belated union, Maja flees to the arms of Rubek's counterbalance--the blustering bear hunter Squire Ulfhej...
Beatrice Lillie is now 73. What is she like, personally? Unfortunately, the reader does not really know after fin ishing her autobiography, which tells too little too long. Unfortunately, too, her humorous style - or is it her collab orators'? - is only fitfully amusing in print. Beatrice Lillie is undoubtedly the funniest woman alive. But those who have not seen her will have to take it On faith. · Gerald Clarke