Word: insipidities
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Like most period musicals, Miss Liberty is charming to look at, with gay costumes and Oliver Smith's elegant and evocative sets. Like most period musicals also, Miss Liberty has a thin, insipid air of farce about it. But it is too much in one key; by not changing enough, it drifts steadily toward the worse. As a complete novice at musicomedy, Mr. Sherwood might have blundered into something truly fresh and individual, but he seems to have carefully studied how to be as much (and as mechanically) like everybody else as possible...
...livelier passages of this tale are all in the '90s and have to do with waltzes and schottisches, gay guardsmen and ruffly romance. When the old general harrumphs his warnings to his niece, the advice seems wasted on a relatively insipid pair (Keyes and Farley Granger). Niven and his lost sweetheart (Teresa Wright) steal the show so completely that in the end it becomes a plea for the past tense, on almost any terms...
...After a few rounds of easy ones, the spellers began to trip. Escutcheon, toboggan, chrysalis, mollify, appurtenant, desecrate, diaphanous, discernible, penitentiary . . . (The master of ceremonies tried to soothe the kids who flubbed: "Too bad, Sara, you stayed up there real long.") Troche, scintilla, poliomyelitis, calyx, cirrus, piccalilli, lachrymose, geodesy, insipid . . . ("That's all right, Martin. I always spell 'insipid' with a 'c,' too.") Syllabus, addendum, flaccid, desiccate, accordion, surcingle, maraschino...
...does is to furnish son Ben with a blackmailing stranglehold on his tyrannical father. Son Oscar is just a born ninny; he tries hard to be a stinker but he hasn't the talent. But the other three would make a quarrelsome day in a bear pit look insipid. Now & then, as they shift grips on each other and set-to all over again, their unmitigated hellishness comes very near absurdity. But they are never undramatic...
...York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra conducted by Stokowski, Rodzinski, Walter, and Damrosch--at different times, of course. It has Heifetz, Rubenstein, Pinza, Piatigorsky, and other artists. It has Vaughn Monroe and Harry James. It has an insipid plot that runs contrapuntal to Beethoven's "Fifth" and Tehaikovsky's "Piano Concerto"--you know ... "Tonight we love...