Word: giraudoux
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Actress Kerr added to the season's fine stockpile of feminine oomph. Heading the list was Audrey Hepburn, who, as the mermaid of Jean Giraudoux's rather waterlogged Ondine, proved a sprite that never was on sea or land. Equally near (though never under) the water, Shirley Booth was the principal lure of By the Beautiful Sea, while France's Jeanmaire brought something boyish, girlish and impish to the lumpish Girl in Pink Tights...
Along Broadway last week, first-nighters twice crowded in excitedly for the openings of new plays: Jean Giraudoux's Ondine and Elmer Rice's The Winner (see THEATER). Among the celebrity-packed audience at each opening were seven men whose arrivals in the theater were meticulously noted by people on both sides of the curtain. The seven: New York's big daily newspaper critics, who wield a power in their field that few newsmen can match. As soon as the final cur tain touched the stage, four of them hurried for the exits and made for their...
Ondine (adapted by Maurice Valency from the French of Jean Giraudoux) brings Audrey Hepburn again to Broadway-or rather, Audrey Hepburn brings Ondine there, as representing her choice from among many scripts. She will almost certainly become the acting sensation of the season, for in Ondine, she has found a part she can act out ravishingly, whether as water sprite or woman. But the part is far more beguiling than the whole. Despite its medieval stage color, its moments of pure enchantment, its other moments of pure Giraudoux, Ondine never quite gets off the ground-or out of the water...
...theory, the famed La Motte Fouque romance should suit the author of The Madwoman of Challlot to perfection. Giraudoux could delicately regild the tale of a sprite who loved and wed and herself became a mortal, only to return from a dismaying world to the deep, her knightly husband dead of her farewell kiss. Giraudoux could savor its melancholy turns and bitter twists, its clash between innocence and worldliness, its sense of mankind's dreams of perfection and descent into reality. And Giraudoux's own resolute but compassionate worldliness does touch Ondine with glints and flecks of gold...
Adaptor Valency's English version is excellent prose. But dramatically, Ondine suffers from too much prose-or at any rate, too little poetry. Virgil Thomson's evocative incidental music suggests a tale better adapted to opera or ballet. For, however ironic and sophisticated, Giraudoux has not brought a new dimension, or even any very striking overtones, to an old story. What the tale gains in philosophical embroideries it more than loses in fairy-tale magic and lyrical feeling. It seems neither simple nor complex enough; in a certain prettiness and lifelessness, it suggests not the court magician...