Word: kolenkhov
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...Take It With You crawls with it. Darkie cook Rheba says to shuffle-foot Donald. "Yassuh, I'm glad I'm colored": angel-daughter Alice cries exasperatedly. "Why can't we be like other people? Roast Beef, and two green vegetables, and doilies on the table..."; Kolenkhov, the emigre ballet master, deadpans. "She is a great woman, the Grand Duchess. Her cousin was the Czar of Russia, and today she is waitress in Child's Restaurant. Columbus Circle." Unadulterated camp is screamingly funny just because it is so guileless. Humor is closely bound to context, and an amusing line...
...zany lady who becomes a playwright because a typewriter was mistakenly delivered to her address, is brilliantly performed: she has assimilated the character so well that her dialogue does not exist as lines, a guile-lessness making at once for high comedy and fine acting. Llody Schwartz's Kolenkhov is a natural scene-stealer. He pronounces "The Monte Carlo Ballet" with just the right Bela Lugosi intonation, he talks and gestures like a proud Rasputin fallen on bad times, and his Romanov leer is so hilariously Russian that one can smell the caviar in the pit. George Mager's classic...
...AURENCE SENELICK'S direction keeps the cast busy. Everyone is always doing something, and some of the bits (Rheba scratching her head with a work while setting the table, Kolenkhov absently clipping threads from his cuffs with a cuticle scissors) are tremendously successful. The timing can have Marx Brothers accuracy (it can also be unbearably sluggish, something that the Harpo troupe might well improve during the summer Agassiz run). But the production is a 1title too cute, and some of the actors create dreadful characters that seem carved out of soap, so that finally the message of the play...
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