Word: girlish
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...Lives begins, Elyot and Amanda divorce. As the play opens, the two are newly remarried, he to Sybil (Katryn Walker), she to Victor Prynne (John Cullum). Embarrassingly enough, both couples honeymoon in Deauville. Worse yet, their respective suites share a balcony. But Elyot is as unsuited for the flighty, girlish Sybil as Amanda is for the formal, gentlemanly Victor. While Amanda and Elyot rediscover their old love. Coward argues, always humorously, that passion often blends both tenderness and hostility. And the tender and hostile moments in the Private Lives mark the play's most charming and comically effective scenes...
TAYLOR's performance, like her voice, is uneven. She drops octaves at will, often with little purpose, and the almost sing-song nature of her voice makes her sound at one moment girlish, at another manly. Yet often her guttural inflections serve her well, as she threatens either Sybil or Elyot. Burton fares better, for he avoids Taylor's tendency to slip into broad, overstated gestures. However, Burton's disinterested demeanor occasionally seems to reflect a boredom with his part. And his and Taylor's hostile interludes lead to the play's most unintentionally humorous moments...
...while at the University of Wisconsin in the early '70s. When they meet again it is 1979; time and events have tamped down their political ardor. But Nessa has become a radical feminist who "had to give up sleeping with my oppressors" and has taken up with a girlish member of her back-up group (Holly Hunter again). Nessa's litany of "Heavy"s and "Oh, wow"s, her laser-beam stare and the brightest, most intimidating smile since Sissy Spacek's identify her as a spirit of the '60s. For the others, life is more...
Kate Nelligan portrays Susan as a superior woman locked in the palace tower of her awful loneliness. Her performance is a little essay on exalted anxiety: allowing her suppressed anger to explode in a girlish squeal, semaphoring fear in a flash of the eyes, ragging her estranged husband for not feeling pain as exquisitely as she does. But there are some moments no one could bring to life. Who could infuse dramatic tension into the leisurely reading of a newspaper? What actress could bring off that old Oscar-cadging ploy, the sudden quiet hysterics in a bubble bath...
...romantic couple's incompatibility appears to be more his fault than hers. Mouis is a fine, precise dancer with exquisite balance and an engaging flair for comedic flirtation. Her Kitri-Dulcinea is a model of girlish exuberance and mischief, quick in her pirouettes and unquiveringly exact in her arabesques...