Word: playing
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Starting from scratch, Spaeth's Music for Fun (Whittlesley House, $2) tells how to make musical instruments out of bottles, tin cans, old bones and nails. For ambition-maddened readers it even goes a step further, telling how to make up a melody, "How to play the piano in no lessons." Suggester Spaeth even suggests how to make conversation about great composers. Sample conversational bung starters...
...Bach-"If you can play Bach, you can play anything...
...Mozart-"I always say if you can play Mozart, you can play anything...
Last week the revised Geneva had its world première in Toronto. However topical, the play is not so much straight political satire as one more Shavian exercise in deflating the human race, one more proof that the world's most famed vegetarian is intellectually a cannibal. Shaw's mischief-hungry mind first conceived of Geneva when he learned that The League of Nations possessed something called the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation. When he decided that the Committee showed few signs of intellect and fewer of cooperation, he licked his chops and fell to. In Geneva...
Anti-fascist in a typically Shavian way, Geneva makes fools rather than villains of the dictators. For that matter, it pretty well makes fools of everybody in the play. But at 83, G. B. S. is no longer foolproof himself. Despite some brilliant thrusts, he bumbles on far too long, says far too little. More of his ideas are old than new, more of his jokes forced than funny. But what Dr. Johnson said of women preaching is also true of octogenarian play writing: "It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done...