Word: playe
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Stocky Pianist Solomon walked briskly to the piano, bald head gleaming under the lights, bowed with almost perfunctory politeness, and sat down. For a full two minutes he peered with patient poise around the hall until his matinee audience settled down into pin-drop silence. Then he began to play the magnificent Bach-Liszt A Minor Prelude and Fugue with the kind of unobtrusive ease and authority that lets an audience relax and forget there is a pianist onstage. In fact, Pianist Solomon even seemed to be enjoying the music himself. Everything else on his program-Scarlatti, Schumann, Beethoven, Chopin...
...directors of the Old Vic, had nothing to say in public about his successes, though a spokesman purred: "We . . . shall always welcome him." Meanwhile, Olivier bubbled with plans of his own. Next month he expects to launch his own firm, Laurence Olivier Productions, with a new James M. Bridie play starring Dame Edith Evans. Tied down to his present busy Old Vic schedule until July, Olivier will neither act in the new show nor direct it, but next season he intends to keep busy as angel, manager, director and star...
Laid in California, the play tells of an aging Italian winegrower who woos a young waitress by mail, wins her by submitting his youthful foreman's photograph in place of his own. Though resentful of being tricked, she goes through with the marriage, only to sin with the foreman. The husband finds out, but reason prevails over melodrama because all three know what they really want-the Italian a wife, the girl a good home, the foreman his freedom...
Reversing a more usual stage procedure, They Knew What They Wanted is a soppy play with a sensible ending. And to reach the right destination, it takes a very slow course through extremely flat country. There is endless talk, much of it in rather baffling broken English. Paul Muni's performance as the husband is studiously misconceived. Carol Stone is almost as much out of line, though more likable, as the girl. In every respect, old-hat playwriting has received a straw-hat production...
...Bermuda, but I never got the chance. This was the only way . . ." And for a more solid tug at the heartstrings, there was a Harlem mother in tearful collapse after her daughter, little Carmelita Rodriguez, and her playmate had been killed by a coal truck in a "safe" play street...