Word: playfulness
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...second production of the season, Alan Gray Holmes' stock company of Boston is hitting the pace. With Erford Gage as its guiding genius, the company has put on a rousing production of Kaufman-Ferber's play, "The Royal Family." By taking the cream of the dramatic crop in the past decade, Mr. Holmes has made a wise move, for the pep of the script carries the play along when the cast has an occasional low moment...
Based on the wild and woolly saga of the Family Barrymore, the play makes little attempt to disguise the famous trio, Ethel, John, and Lionel, under any pretense of fiction. Even under the pseudonym of Anthony Cavendish, John is still breaking up cameras and swatting directors; even as Julie Cavendish, Ethel is still having great hand-wringing emotions. Perhaps the element of cats looking at kings, of theatre audiences looking at the royalty of the stage with their hair down, is what makes the play so entertaining and so eminently satisfying to the humble playgoer. Even the Barrymores have earthly...
...play gagged up by Kaufman takes hair-trigger handling to put it across. The production at the Copley, however, started off like a funeral procession. About the middle of the first act hope was fast fading when in whooped Erford Gage in a coon skin coat and the show began to shake the dust off its feet. By the end of the second act everyone was talking at once. Mr. Gage was roaring up and down stairs, Joan Croydon (Julie) was standing mid-stage screaming her head off, and things looked brighter. Things continued to look bright straight through...
...State control boards (half the States have them), county & city health authorities, a multitude of laws play the same game. In 30 cities out of 129 studied, State law demands that store and home milk prices be identical. Health authorities can and do limit the milk supply by refusing to license and inspect farmers who want to sell in the city...
Four years ago a young English writer, Wystan Hugh Auden, incorporated these lines in the chorus of a play. Auden's poems were at that time widely talked about and widely misunderstood-with some reason. They seemed brilliant, veiled, obscurely revolutionary. By October 1939, however, few Englishmen could still look blank over such lines as these. Their meaning was all too painfully clear...