Word: picnics
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...This Time of Year at All!, his "informal and unpremeditated autobiography," is a hunt over the old ground for neglected oddments of gossip and reminiscence. It contains many fine old chestnuts (such as George Moore describing William Butler Yeats as "looking like an umbrella forgotten at a picnic") and a few fresh ones (such as the same George Moore, affronted by a badly cooked omelette, summoning a policeman and saying sternly: "Go down and arrest [my cook] for obtaining money under false pretenses"). But most of the new material consists of Author Gogarty's telling a lot more stories...
...mother who achieves a boozy sublimation after the death of her jet-propelled offspring (Muriel Berkson), Jean Stapleton, a triumphantly fun-loving barmaid, and Martita Reid, a Mexican dowager of sufficient force to faze even indomitable Actress Anderson. Director José Quintero has caught some memorable vignettes: a beach picnic, as airily languid as the colored soap bubbles blown by a Mexican girl, and a muddled wedding party, alive with tears and frayed tempers. Oliver Smith's scenery and the music composed by the playwright's husband, Paul Bowles, are nicely in key with the disturbing childhood memories...
...Picnic," a technical triumph by playwright William Inge, sometimes swaps precision for honest emotion, but the production, with excellent acting by Janice Rule and Ralph Meeker, is uniformly effective...
...lovely pair of legs and tries hard to live up to them. Keenan Wynn and James Whitmore, as the collection agents for a prominent gambler, should bring down the house as two of the daintiest thugs who ever did a sentimental buck and wing at the annual picnic of Murder, Inc. The rest of the dances, however, seem overrehearsed-as though the dancers had long since stopped enjoying them. Only the music, some of the very best that Cole Porter ever wrote, is unimpaired; the picture is almost worth seeing just to hear it again...
...Belafonte sings with his intriguing Calypso style and in a few of the sketches for De Wolfe and Miss Gingold. Occasionally bizarre, like "Dinner for One," an aged spinster's banquet for suitors dead and gone, most of these skits have considerable wit and imagination. Though the parody of "Picnic" is rather distasteful, De Wolfe takes a delightful poke at "My Cousin Rachel." Miss Gingold, however, as the dancer, "La Pistachio," provides the most entertaining moments of the revue. Garbed in an uproarious butterfly costume, the lusty old harridan is hilarious as the vamp of Paris...