Word: giraudoux
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Roland Barthes believes a large part of the tower's fascination is its "fully useless" quality: "It achieved absolute zero as a monument." In a 1975 book, Author Joseph Harriss makes the same point: "Parisians have always recognized the human need for the superfluous." The late playwright Jean Giraudoux, who was born around the time of the tower's conception, came to its defense. It has reached an age, he observed, "when one likes to have children-and American girls-crawling all over...
France, too, has an emergent superstar. Isabelle Adjani, 19, is "the only actress who has made me cry in front of a television screen," said Director François Truffaut after seeing her in Giraudoux's Ondine. Truffaut signed her for an epic role, the doomed daughter of Victor Hugo in The Story of Adele H, to be released this fall. "I wanted to do a film with her very quickly," he explained, "because I thought I could steal from her those precious things-the way her face and body express everything...
Lacking the audacity to represent a naive childlike purity of faith, and incapable of the sophisticated myth-mocking irony of an Anouilh or a Giraudoux, Peter Stone rests his book, derived from Clifford Odets' The Flowering Peach, on the pitiably thin humor of anachronism. Except for one beguiling ballad, I Do Not Know a Day I Did Not Love You, Richard Rodgers' score is almost barren of melodic appeal, and Martin Charnin's lyrics could have been ticked off by a metronome...
...Roundabout's artistic director, Gene Feist, has not tampered with the basic myth. Oedipus has murdered his father, married his mother, sired an incestuous brood, and his eyes are gouged out. What Sloan has done, albeit with lesser aesthetic power and wit, is what Anouilh and Giraudoux have done with the Greek myths...