Word: parsons
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...first two acts of the play--before the audience learns of Osvald Alving's disease--are like a drawing room comedy, only with little humor. Even if the cast were superb, all that could hold the audience's attention is the pomposity of Parson Manders' (spiritual advisor to Mrs. Alving) and his inability to contend with Osvald's defense of illicit marriage. At great length, the characters speak to each other seriously, but pointlessly, setting up the few magnificent scenes before the final curtain...
...Dick Dudgeon, the imposturing knave of the title, Actor Douglas gnashes his teeth - as well as the arch dialogue -and looks less like the male Candida that Shaw intended than like a Sportin' Life in tights. Actor Lancaster, as the local parson, glooms away Shaw's most romantic scenes as if he were lost on a Brontë moor. In a climactic scene of comic derring-do, ex-Acrobat Lancaster makes heroic hash of a colonial court house and all the Redcoats in it. Otherwise he is as stiff and starchy as the clerical collar he eventually gives...
...crackup, failing heart, aftereffects of a mild stroke), declared that he is as knowledgeable as all his doctors and psychiatrists put together, "dis-hired" the whole passel of them. In the Will Rogers suite of the Hotel Texas next day, in rumpled drawers and sports shirt, Long received Methodist Parson G. W. French Jr., president of the city's General Ministers Association. After Long had rambled on for an hour, the Rev. Mr. French emerged, asked: "Does he always cuss so much...
Among the newcomers, the Welsh parson Evans, who "makes fritters of English," comes off well in the hands of Richard Waring. And Morris Carnovsky is marvelously crotchety as Caius, the French physician, who is normally "abusing of God's patience and the King's English." Carnovsky has introduced some side-splitting bits with a rapier; and indeed the entire Evans-Caius duel scene is brilliantly staged. Jack Bittner rants vigorously as the Host of the Garter Inn with an excessive penchant for the adjective "bully." Frederic Warriner is aptly idiotic and cringing as the suitor Slender. And nine-year...
...author's odd conclusion is perhaps colored by the fact that Perry Madoc is all girl, and a parson's daughter. Anne Humphreys by name, she is a fortyish Welsh woman, chose the house of Collins as her English publisher "because you publish the Book of Common Prayer...