Word: harvey
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week the gentle toper of Mary Chase's Harvey was introducing his invisible rabbit companion to a host of new friends. A solid success in its first three weeks, the Viennese production of the Broadway hit set off more excitement than Vienna's theater had known in months...
...Many of Harvey's new acquaintances were quite unfriendly. The Communist press hinted darkly that he was actually a capitalist Trojan horse which would lull Austrians into forgetting life's serious problems. The Red Army's local paper warned its readers that "Harvey is not really a harmless bit of fluff . . . The great mission of this rabbit," it wrote, "is to overcome reality-the bad truth one always wants to put away...
Even many friendly Viennese were puzzled. Some sought deep significance in the fey comedy; one critic likened Harvey to Hamlet. Moreover, Vienna, which had been proud godmother to Freudian psychiatry, barely recognized that delicate science in its U.S. version. Certainly the alienist in Harvey, who yearns for a maiden and a keg of beer under a shady maple tree, scarcely seemed in the great Viennese tradition of soul-searchers...
Psychiatrics notwithstanding, most Viennese theatergoers took Harvey to their hearts as simply as a child takes his Easter bunny. Restaurant-keepers, says Vienna's Elwood Dowd (Actor Oscar Karlweis), are constantly thrusting gift packages at him. Most of them contain cabbage and carrots for the kindly rabbit who nightly helps his friend to find good in his fellow man. Even the Polish Minister seemed to have fallen sway to the rabbit's charm. At a dinner at the legation recently, he called Karlweis aside for a vodka. He poured out two glasses. "One for you," he told Vienna...
Report from Barber Frederick Harvey, whose shop gives George Bernard Shaw a haircut about four times a year: "Mr. Shaw is getting a little thin on top now, but is still remarkably thick at the sides. He is wearing his beard a little shorter than he used to, but I am never allowed to touch his eyebrows." Shaw likes to chat, and even lets the barber get a word in occasionally, but when the talk begins to bore him, he starts tapping his fingertips together. "I know the sign," says Harvey, "and I shut...