Word: littlewoods
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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...
...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...
Miming, dancing, and singing the lovely old songs of The Great War, Miss Littlewood's actors lightly trace its course. National leaders disclaim any thought of war and then whip out their offensive plans--just in case. Allied generals hold each other in highest contempt, refusing to speak the other's language--until they receive medals. And the audience remembers that "Its a Long Way to Tipperary." But in the background a neon sign chronicles the facts: ALLIES DEFEATED--150,000 CASUALTIES, ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT--30,000 DEAD IN THE TRENCHES...
Despite the originality of its staging and contrary to London reviews heralding it as the "best play of the year if not the decade," Miss Littlewood's production encourages tedium through its repetition. Erecting a super-structure reminiscent of The Threepenny Opera, complete with skeletal sets, narrator, and Kurt Weil orchestra, she and writer Charles Chilton have failed to provide a decent base, for their play is as black and white as the actors' costumes. After five minutes no one doubts that boobery is the best that the leaders can manage, that soldiers are great guys if only left alone...