Word: mosse
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Arnold Moss has taken on the seemingly impossible task of condensing the whole work into one two-and-a-half-hour evening, with surprisingly successful results. None of the original five parts is wholly dispensed with; and the eight acts have been compressed into six scenes. Moss has rightly stuck to the main theme of the work. He has pared away the lengthy digressions and the superfluous characters (such as the comic takeoffs on the British statesmen Asquith and Lloyd George...
...Moss has shown good taste, too. He has done most of the cutting in the central triptych, where Shaw's writing was weakest and most forced. The two acts of Part I ("In the Beginning") remain virtually intact, and these are really great writing and great theatre. In Part II ("Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas"), Moss has strung several comments by one man together into a short address; with the house lights half up, Professor Barnabas speaks to the audience as though addressing one of his biology classes--an effective solution indeed. For Part III ("The Thing Happens") Moss drew...
This show brings out the versatility of the five stars--Celeste Holm, James Daly, Valerie Bettis, Michael Tolan and Arnold Moss--who are called on to play from two to five different major roles each. All these performances are polished. Miss Holm (young and elderly Eve, Mrs. Lutestring, Zoo, and Lilith) seems a bit uneasy as young Eve clad only in a few leaves, but she is first-rate after that, especially in her denunciatory speech to Adam and Cain, and in Lilith's concluding monologue. Daly (young and elderly Adam, Archbishop, and An Ancient) is also uneasy at first...
...wonderfully modulated and deep-throated voice. As "the most subtle" Serpent she slightly lingers with superb effect over the sibilants that Shaw carefully placed in her speeches. Tolan (Cain, and Zozim) brings real fire to the role of the world's first transgressor of the Fifth and Sixth Commandments. Moss (Prof. Barnabas, Accountant General, and the Elderly Gentleman) manages to make individual his three well-seasoned men. John Granger (Strephon) and Dorothy Whitney (Chloe) round out the cast...
...signed her first record contract (with Vik). "One thing I don't want to do in music," she says, "is to go in for the oh-how-sad-I-am-I've-lost-the-only-man-I've-ever-had, and I'm-covered-with-moss school of thing." She knows just how she wants to sound: "It's like nudes in art; you can have them Manet's way, in their purest form, or you can have them Petty style." Pat is hot after that big Manet style...