Word: kanin
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Live Wire (by Garson Kanin; produced by Michael Todd) rather suggests to Broadway the arrival of summer than the imminence of fall. If sometimes gay enough for the one, it is never good enough for the other. And it is never good enough-even in intention-for the author of Born Yesterday. So little has Author-Director Kanin been concerned with writing a play that he hasn't wholly managed to write a show. As in last season's The Rat Race, he has leaned heavily on vaudeville...
...returned to the stage in 1945 to play the lead in Garson Kanin's Born Yesterday, quit the cast during the out-of-town tryout, leaving the role (and stardom) to Judy Holliday. For Peter Pan, her first Broadway hit, she studied fencing and ballet, sheared her hair to a near crewcut, left her husky, quavery voice exactly as movie fans have always known...
Relying on the local critics isn't always practical either, because the show you see on opening night may be quite different from the one you see during the second week of the run. (A flagrant case of this is Garson Kanin's play, "The Rat Race," of which only 35 percent of the original 'Boston' script remained by the time it opened in New York...
...well acted by Barry Nelson) is a saxophone player from the sticks, an easy mark who is fleeced of almost everything but his hopes; the girl (Betty Field) is a dime-a-dancer with a past (which she is living in). Playwright Kanin's slickest trick is to portray their and their neighbors' troubles in the form of little variety turns-a band that plays jazz before swiping the boy's instruments, a vaudeville has-been who bounces into his act, and a landlady with a monologue...
...just that Playwright Kanin sets theater above drama, but that he displays an almost equal lack of respect for his sordid material and his own talent. The one concern with squalor is to make it picturesque at all costs; with vulgarity, to exploit it for laughs. In the end The Rat Race gets nowhere; worse, it gets dull, repeating a lot of facile tricks and typifying a theater where, more & more, clever playwrights write everything but plays...