Word: humors
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...worthwhile as a backward look into the early output of one of the great spirits of modern music. Said Colin Mason of the Guardian: "Although it is not likely ever to find a place in the repertory, we should hear it a few more times yet to savor its humor and originality before putting it on the shelf as an immature work." As for Pianist Kentner, he thinks the Scherzo for Piano and Orchestra is uneven, but, says: "The best part is certainly the last part, where we get to something like the real Bartok...
...name of justice-the kind of justice that demands a life for a life. Like the play, the picture ignores the rational arguments against capital punishment. It simply takes its audience inside an Irish prison and bolts the gate; and then with a world of Irish charm and humor shows everybody round the dear old place, shows everybody how it feels to live in a cell-and die on a rope...
Adapting Burt Blechman's novel, How Much? into a twenty-four scene farce, Miss Hellman imparts humor and meaning to characters, who in the book are haphazardly petty and distasteful. The play examines a family who formally seem to fulfill a television version of acceptable behavior, cute foibles, happy live... and judges them substantively immoral, destructive and miserable...
...their culture that are in fact ugly. The most vulgar financial preoccupation has been made the substance of frivolity: witness the well-paid boor, Allan Sherman. At the same time, there seems to be a process of counter-assimilation (to the extent that a nation's theater and humor are an index of its culture, America is becoming increasingly 'Jewish'). The country is adopting only those strains of Jewish culture that reenforce its own social outlook--substitution of financial concerns for humane ones, the apotheosis of anonymity and conformity--not the traditional respect for scholarship or the attitude toward learning...
...subject that Miss Hellman treats with particular humor and good sense is the uneasy relationship between post-ghetto Jews and Negroes. The play opens with Berney singin' on his guitar "De life of a nigger ain't much good..." a point to which the Halpern maid, who overhears him, speaks with some feeling. In a later scene, Berney urges social action on a Negro who mugs him, more or less to shut him up. As these two episodes perhaps suggest, there is considerable overlap in the construction. Since a scene or two might be cut in the process of tightening...