Word: milquetoasts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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McHale's Navy and the short-lived sitcom bearing his own name, made it obvious that he is, at best, a second banana. Knotts, the Milquetoast deputy sheriff on the old Andy Griffith Show, tried to make a virtue of his inability to sing, dance or string a show together. Opening night, Guest Anthony Newley pushed Knotts around and took command-a running gag that provoked a feeling of sympathy. But can other guests and the same gag make a season...
...company. With an accretion of under statements, Miles builds the universal tragedy of a family whose past consumes its future, that finds it far harder to acknowledge mistakes than to perpetuate them. His slow evocation of a vanished England is evident in the smallest vignette. For example: the town milquetoast (Norman Bird) appears at a charity show, blazes to life for one salacious song, then returns-almost with relief-to his eunuchoid role...
...little of either. In the end, Sir Gideon is forced to throw out everything except Askelon in a battle that is not so much pitched as rigged. Gielgud lends the part a tremulous, blinking dignity, but he can only play it the way Shaffer wrote it: as the milquetoast of human kindness. Like the devil, the devil's advocate has all the best lines, even if many of them are overwrought and overwrit. It is Magee's poet-haranguing, seducing, at once flailing out with and wincing from his own lash-who jolts the play occasionally into...