Word: lessner
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Shakespeare's play is ultimately a comedy, and the cast clearly presents it as such. Harvard sophomore Lucian Wu, as the foppish Frenchman, Dr. Caius, and Frank Timmerman, as the effeminate Slender, bring much-needed comic relief to the bathetic love scenes between Page's daughter Anne (Joanne Lessner) and Fenton (Kenneth Goodwin). Slender and Caius, vain suitors for Anne's heart, hide in the foliage when the two lovers arrive on the scene. Timmeran with his engaging bug-eyed innocence lisps his way through his performance, while Wu resorts to more sword-flinging bravura...
Despite the sincerity of the singing, the production seems oddly stiff. The singers have no problems executing the notes; it's the acting--or rather non-acting--that gives them the most problems. In the famous garden love scene, Goodwin and Lessner sing most sweetly to each other. Unfortunately they look more like two slabs in Stonehenge than the amorous lovers they are supposed...
Sleepy Hollow (based on Washington living's Legend of Sleepy Hollow; book & lyrics by Russell Maloney, Miriam Battista and Ruth Hughes Aarons; music by George Lessner; produced by Lorraine Lester) is passably tuneful and monumentally tedious. Washington Irving's famous yarn of lanky, spindle-necked Ichabod Crane-who was as ill-starred in love as in looks and was chased into immortality by the Headless Horseman-would seem likely material for a musical. It comes equipped with standard light-operatic fixtures: period atmosphere, picturesque locale, broad humor, folkish fantasy; it seems a cinch to wire for dancing...
...Wehrmacht continued World War II by other means is the theme of this novel by Austrian-born Erwin Lessner. Author Lessner, 46, is an anti-Nazi from way back. For years he kept a jump ahead of the Gestapo in Berlin, Czechoslovakia and Denmark. Trapped in Norway in 1940, he was "questioned" by the Gestapo for 35 days; it was seven months before he was able to walk again. In 1941 he managed to reach the U.S. Phantom Victory is partly ferocious satire, partly deadly earnest foreboding, but throughout it proclaims Author Lessner's ruthlessly simple conviction...
...Lessner tells it, defeated Germany's main weapon was confusion. Overnight the Wehrmacht was dissolved ; not a single officer remained to offer Germany's "unconditional surrender." But veterans popped up again in strange places, such as the Brandenburg Canoe Club and the Association of Prussian Stamp Collectors. Nazi leaders vanished. The result of the long-awaited trial of German war criminals was: five Germans convicted of rape, four of cruelty to animals, five of reckless driving in congested areas. Countries ravaged by Hitler demanded the return of their looted property. They got it promptly: Austria received...