Word: genteelisms
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Pepsi Cola Girl seems to be selling her part rather than playing it. As Mrs. Bennet, the huntress of five carriage-trade husbands, Hermione Gingold growls, minces and struts through her endless matrimonial campaigns. She would be fiercely funny if First Impressions were a bedroom farce, and not a genteel domestic satire. As it is, Comedienne Gingold breaks up the house, and shatters the tenuous Jane Austen mood. The musical's key failure is that of scoring one of literature's string quartets for the theatrical equivalent of two brass bands...
Bone-Dry Wit. Born in a Hampshire parsonage in 1775, Jane Austen grew up in the world of the French and American Revolutions, and showed no trace of interest in either. The world of her six novels is simply and finally that of genteel young women gunning for husbands (she herself died a spinster at 41). Included inevitably in this world are harassed fathers and embattled moms, superfluous daughters and choosy suitors, haughty heiresses and dashing cads, all playing their parts in an endless round of dances, tea parties and chaperoned strolls, and doing their best never...
...contrary, it is a very nice one. It is well-dressed, well-spoken, and well-bred, Every word and action appears carfully premeditated and skillfully executed. When not a word of a play holds any surprises to many in the audience, its production may all too easily become a genteel ritual in propitiation of the gods of Culture. The Old Vic personnel do not fight against this tendency; they positively embrace it. Only at a few points is anything so unseemly as a spontaneous emotion allowed to mar the ceremonial calm. American productions of Shakespeare are likely to have abounding...
...Bull" Connor is a big voice in Birmingham, where a smelter economy, stamped onto Alabama's rural culture, makes a melting pot of raw men as well as raw metals. Birmingham, settled six years after the Civil War, is no repository of genteel Southern tradition and or moderation, has been keyed to violence, whether labor troubles in the 1930s or desegregation in the 1950s. And Birmingham's white country people, teeming in from piney woods to steel mills, view desegregation less as an abstract threat to be fended off by lawyers than as a specific, bread-and-butter...
Judith Anderson plays the star role like a First Lady of the Stage, which for Miss Anderson is nothing new. Her Australian accent is comprehensible once you get used to it, and not inappropriate for the memory-ridden, shabby-genteel matriarch. She projects a genuine grandeur, a sense that no matter what Isabel Lawton does she is somehow worthy of admiration. In cold fact Isabel Lawton is worthy of very little admiration, and Miss Anderson makes her much better worth watching than Mr. Lamkin had any right to expect...