Word: lunt
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...Great Sebastians, the latest starring vehicle for Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, is a theatrical halfbreed described by its authors as "a melodramatic comedy." There is nothing intrinsically bad about such a combination, but Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse give the impression that they really wanted to write either a melodrama or a comedy, but that they are uncertain about how to bring the union about. As a result, their play is neither very funny nor very exciting...
...Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, for whom the play was created, try very hard to bring the inert bulk of the comedy to life. They assume foreign accents--he, something that sounds like German and is supposed to be Czech; she, cockney--they hurry about the stage a if they were really not more than sixty years old, and they argue about what code to use in their mind reading act as thought the subject held great interest. But, in the end, the Lunts too lose out to mediocre writing. The backstage life of vaudeville performers has so often been...
...Playwright MAXWELL ANDERSON, in a funeral oration spoken in St. George's Episcopal Church, Manhattan, by Actor ALFRED LUNT...
...whole thing is decorously romantic -for it is always infinitely seemlier for the Lunts to live in sin together than in the utmost respectability apart. Throughout the evening, they offer slightly grander and more empedestaled versions of their time-honored selves; and by now, indeed, Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt are much less actors than roles. Now, once again, they manifest their uniqueness. She provides a heraldic squeal or purr; he drops to a sudden flawless guttural pianissimo; each not merely throws away a line, but throws it, with a double backward flip, over an exiting left shoulder...
...problem, perhaps, is one of co-ordination. When Diensen is supposed to be tongue-tied and vulgar, Lunt is self-conscious and primly profane. Then Coward reverses his field and Diensen must be lyrically vision ary; here Lunt is up to the task but Coward falters. With long monologues about the physical glories of prospering America, Diensen drags his heels and the pace of the vehicle is reduced still further. Coward has been much more entertaining about Brooklyn than he is now about the rest of the United States...