Word: paycock
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Juno (book by Joseph Stein, music and lyrics by Marc Blitzstein, dances by Agnes de Mille) is a Pyrrhic victory of Broadway talent over an Irish genius. This musical version of Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock paradoxically mutes O'Casey's inner music with song, fetters his soaring spirit with dance, and deflects the lyric flow of his dialogue into prosy pools of talk...
...modern classic, Juno and the Paycock is fashioned around characters who escape the last-act curtain and become dramatic immortals like Hamlet, Tartuffe, and St. Joan. Captain Boyle, the strutting Paycock, is a Homeric boozer, braggart and whine. With a sea-rolling gait and a gravelly brogue, Melvyn Douglas makes him an amiably puckish buffoon but scarcely a Dublin Falstaff. O'Casey's Juno has a spiny tongue for her shiftless husband, but she is also an Earth Mother of Sorrows. Her unmarried daughter becomes pregnant; her son loses an arm to the British and his life...
...about ten inmutes in the second act, a fine musical version of Juno and the Paycock is currently on view at the Shubert. These ten minutes show a backyard party, conducted to the tune of a cheerfully cheesy waltz, suddenly interrupted by the entrance of a woman on the way to the funeral of her son, who had been killed fighting for the Irish Republic. Most of the party, suddenly chastened, troop out as mourners, and the man who had been forced to inform on the dead soldier tries to relieve his feelings in a desperately gay dance...
...cakes and ale in June nor even sausages and stout. There is supposed to be pathos, too, in the spectacle of poor, hard-working Juno Boyle slaving away to support her husband, a strutting "paycock" who spends his days carousing with his crony in the pub. But there isn't. The story of Juno's daughter, Mary, who impregnates and then deserts her, raises the possibility that O'Casey is the arrantest disher-up of unrefurbished cliche who ever presumed to deal in "serious" drama. Only in the account of Juno's son, Johnny, the unwilling informer, do O'Casey...
...Touch of the Poet. And other Stevens projects include such items as The Pleasure of His Company, with Cornelia Otis Skinner, The Man in the Dog Suit, with Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, and Daarlin' Man, a musical version of O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock. Some of these may soon rank with earlier Stevens' successes-Four Poster, Tea and Sympathy, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof...