Word: giraudoux
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...Giraudoux's play needs Miss Singewald. Its concave philosophy -- the rich, destructive, conformist bad guys against the poor, poetic good guys -- wouldn't float in the Dead Sea without a strong focus on the heroine. For example, it all comes right in the second act, as three madwomen (Miss Singewald, Valerie Clark, and Carla Barringer) amicably enter Miss Singewald's basement to plan the elimination of the world's evil men. They attack each other, apologize, criticize, contradict, dare, resolve, shift positions, and conclude as amicably as when they came in. And in the end, the world's evil...
...fact that she commands a physical plasticity beyond the magic of makeup men. She has conquered more than 130 roles, from the giddy 13-year-old Natasha in War and Peace, to the 61-year-old lioness in The Lion in Winter, to the steely title role in Giraudoux's Judith. Her voice is all champagne in the comedies, darkens to cognac in the heavier roles. She is a body actress, ruling the stage with grace and power and actually seeming to lean into her lines...
From the script alone I couldn't tell whose side Giraudoux was on. And I wasn't even left with that everybody-loses-most-of-the-time wistfulness one feels at the end of most of those. Nineteenth Century demi-tragedies where everybody loses. My only strong emotion was that Lucille was a pretty stupid girl...
Skip Ascheim directed Giraudoux's "The Apollo of Bellac" in quite a different style, but with almost equal success. The only serious problem was that the play depends entirely on one idea, and consequently sags...
JUDITH. Jean Giraudoux has fashioned a parable on heroism and piety from the story of the Jewess who glorified herself and saved her nation by destroying a conqueror. Rosemary Harris' Judith embraces all the facets of a complex woman...