Word: madding
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Helen Hayes's brilliant performance fits into this spirit nearly perfectly, which is not really surprising, although playing an exaggeratedly gay, moderately mad French aristocrat might have seemed a bit beyond her great scope and skill. She triumphs, as usual. Her gestures are a catalogue of how to act; her bright eyes and posed postures handle comedy with a great flourish...
Jean Anouilh is an imaginative playwright, which makes him almost unique in the world of commercially successful contemporary theater. His Time Remembered creates a light, slightly mad, slightly ethereal atmosphere which, if rather insubstantial in itself, sets up countless brilliant little touches--situations, moments, gestures, speeches. The play is not in itself as successful as The Lark, or as Thieve's Carnival or Toreadors, both of which it mildly resembles in tone. Yet the present production adds considerable creativity to the script, and makes the show as a whole very nearly live up to the high standards of interest expected...
...Wonderland, but soon ties some reality to the originally puzzling circumstances. A young milliner finds herself on a Brittany estate where an ice cream man sell no ice cream, a cab driver keeps rabbits in his ivy-grown cab, and Helen Hayes, looking like a magnificent ninety-year-old Mad- woman of Chaillot, sweeps in and out of the reception room, ecstatically explaining nothing. It shortly becomes clear that the Duchess (Helen Hayes) has in various ways frozen time, for the sake of her melancholy nephew the prince (Richard Burton), by recreating the surroundings of his one brief love affair...
Adenauer himself angrily denounced the letter at a press conference. "He was so mad he said I'd be lynched for the same thing in America," Mrs. Ungeheuer said. Her reply, however, was, "I am an American citizen and you can't prevent me from writing a letter to my Secretary of State...
...Growing Up is Actor Emlyn Williams reciting or interpreting or impersonating Dylan Thomas' tales of his "young dog" days-at least for a while. After that, performer and storyteller triumphantly become one. On a stage with a single chair. Williams expands into a lusty segment of Wales, a mad but exact re-creation of childhood, a whole lurching animal-orchestra of fun. Williams is Dylan Thomas and Thomas' characters and Thomas as a character. But quite as deftly as he has dug into the people...