Word: grizzard
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...sweating, straining as they haul a cannon to stage center. It belches smoke. It is hidden in smoke. The whole theater is going up in smoke. A man has mounted the cannon, but it is difficult to see him, let alone hear him. He is King Henry V (George Grizzard), and what he is saying is, "God for Harry, England and St. George." What the scene is saying is-the prop's the thing...
...Guthrie competes handsomely with the Olivier film, his leading actor does not. The pattern of George Grizzard's gifts and limitations comes clearer with each performance he gives. When there is a broad streak of nastiness in a character, Grizzard plays the role splendidly, but something sly, evasive and insecure in his countenance and bearing saps all conviction from his attempts to play parts like Hamlet and Henry V. His "Once more unto the breach, dear friends" and St. Crispin's Day ("we happy few") speeches are not plunges of passion but sputterings of saliva...
Henry V alternates between high spirits and desolation of spirit, and Grizzard is best when the morale of the play and the troops is lowest. When one of Henry's brothers, Gloucester, speaks fearfully of the French, the king quietly says, "We are in God's hands, brother, not in theirs." Again, Grizzard is touchingly good as he comforts his tattered band on the eve of Agincourt with "a little touch of Harry in the night." On balance, however, he does not drive the play forward. He is hauled through it, rather like the cannon...
...Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Columbia; four records, $15) explodes with the same stinging ferocity in the living room that it has on stage. The poisoned rapiers are words, and they are wielded with lethal skill by the original cast: Arthur Hill, Uta Hagen, George Grizzard and Melinda Dillon. Those who wish to achieve a malignantly Woolfish rapport may duplicate the time scheme of the play by tinkling the ice cubes and spinning the disks, starting about 2:30 a.m. Match the cast drink for drink and watch the 5:30 dawn come up like anathema...
...George Grizzard reveal "something naked of the human condition. I've got to get him to take off his 'clothes.' " He failed. Grizzard is a buttoned-up Hamlet in a buttoned-down shirt, a bland suburbanite puzzled by the mess he is in, but with no hint of being the terrible plaything of destiny. He is the nice boy who always got good marks at Wittenberg U., never dented the family convertible, was engaged to that sweet Ophelia girl next door, and then inexplicably got his name splashed all over the tabloids by his revolting behavior toward...