Word: littlewood
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...What a Lovely War grins like a skull at the follies of World War I. An animated musical documentary, directed with blazing skill and ingenuity by Britain's Joan Littlewood, Lovely War is constructed like a theatrical montage. Period songs, sketches, gauze-clad music-hall girls and blown-up film stills fill the stage while a lighted news ticker across the backdrop impersonally taps out the monstrous dance of death: ALLIES LOSE 850,000 MEN IN 1914. Mockingly ironic, magnetically fascinating, Lovely War defies a playgoer to settle back in his seat. Tender, frolicsome and tragic, it turns spilled...
...firm hand that guides Lovely War is Joan Littlewood's, the musical's voice and mind are often Bertolt Brecht's. By decking her men and women in Pierrot and Pierrette outfits, she puts commedia dell'arte garb on the Brechtian notion that in the 20th century the individual is no longer a meaningful entity. It was Brecht, too, who recognized that a nostalgic song put in a satirical context could then be savored for its sentimentality even while it was being bitterly spoofed. Songs like Pack Up Your Troubles and Keep the Home Fires Burning...
...Anguish. The musical crowningly succeeds, just as Brecht did, by failing to observe two pet Brechtian laws: Do not let the audience indulge in an emotional binge. And teach it a lesson. The intended lessons of Mother Courage and Oh What a Lovely War are virtually identical. Brecht and Littlewood both argue that wars are engineered by knaves, fought and suffered by fools, and exploited by profiteers. But playgoers get a different message. They come away instead with heightened respect for the indomitability of the human spirit in adversity...
...Bajour, which has been woven from Joseph Mitchell's New Yorker look at the city's swindling gypsies. The season's only imported musical will be Oh What a Lovely War, a savage but moving World War I satire directed by London's Joan Littlewood...
...plane has so far got exactly nowhere. Now the big argument seems to be whether it is really practicable in its proposed form. Aviation Consultant William Littlewood recently told a Washington aeronautical conference that ground dwellers cannot adjust to the SST's shattering sonic boom, suggested "careful routing" of the planes at a cost in time and fuel. Last week Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson, the Lockheed vice president who designed both the U-2 and the A11, said as he received an achievement award from the National Aviation Club: "I am very concerned about the sonic boom where...