Word: playgoer
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...brigandage. Swiss Cheese is "The Honest Son," faithfully concealing a military payroll box after the enemy overruns his outfit. While Mother Courage haggles over the bribe price for his pardon, he is shot. At this blow, Mother Courage gives a fist-stifled yowl of animal grief and the playgoer grudgingly begins to pity her fate...
...mild comic conceit at best, and time has made the resulting camouflage and persiflage dimly dispiriting. In 1936, Russia was remotely terrible but not dangerous, still exotic enough for period romance and period humor, attitudes no 1963 playgoer can sustain. Tovarich needed a boldly inventive face lifting, but its book and lyrics sadly sag. Its tune-shy music may please any metronomes in the audience. Sample wit: "Let's go down to the kitchen and get a potato and make our own vodka." Sample lyric...
Just when a playgoer wishes he could do the same, Vivien Leigh divertingly peps up the proceedings. She shimmies a madcap Charleston that ought to be recorded on a film strip of memorable moments from forgettable musicals. She torch-sings an affecting lament for lost first love (I Know the Feeling) in a bistro baritone that huskily recalls early Marlene Dietrich. In party scenes, she alone does not resemble a fugitive from a Vat 69 ad. Although her eyes seem candlelit with some private poetry of grief, she plays the regal scamp all evening, ornamenting with a playfully aristocratic touch...
What is strongest in the play itself is O'Neill's flashing mastery of theater, the way he can put a character in a preposterous situation and still make a playgoer cliffhang over the outcome. The archetypal relationships, father versus son. Nina grieving over the child that will never be born, have unimpaired emotional authority. So do some scenes of Chekhovian poignance. such as Nina's autumnal soliloquy on the meaning of the men in her life and what time has done to her and them...
...lighting his own finger instead of the leading lady's cigarette. Arkin is a clownish glossary of theatrical ineptitude. Making his debut, he catapults onstage and swallows his voice whole, but, as his parents rightly say, "he's the best one." Thanks to Alan Arkin, a playgoer can Enter Laughing and exit roaring...