Word: plays
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...sometimes, as in the case of a comedy called The Big Heist, even such broad shoulders as Bert Lahr's cannot carry it as far as the corner saloon. Written with an eye on Damon Runyon and a finger in a dictionary of U.S. criminal argot, the play explored a quaint old vein of humor among thieves: Lahr, as a low man on the totem pole of crime, joined another aging juvenile delinquent (Fred Gwynne) to rob an armored car of $1,000,000 just to impress a lady (Mildred Natwick). Playing a sometime short-order cook whose sauces...
...Molnár-and perhaps not quite sheer enough in itself. It has been attractively fairy-tailored: imaginative Oliver Smith sets, chic Miles White costumes, pretty Vernon Duke background music. And Anouilh has given it good writing enough, and elegant mannerism enough, of its own. But at times the play seems merely thin where it should be diaphanous, merely slight where it ought to be airy. Perhaps it needs a born pastry cook like Molnar, with his delicately browned, bite-sized ironies and his lightly philosophic macaroons. Perhaps it needs a more pervasive verve. Perhaps it only needs a wicked...
Nude With Violin (by Noel Coward) is, more accurately, Noel with one string to his bow. The play concerns a just-dead and extremely famous painter who, it turns out, had never painted a single one of his pictures. As the painter's cheeky, in-on-the-swindle valet. Coward buzzes about while the dead man's family try to hush things up and cope with the actual painter-and potential blackmailer. Then it turns out that there was also a second painter. And, for that matter, a third-and a fourth. Though Coward has carefully varied...
Repeating over and over the same joke -it can hardly be termed satire-Nude With Violin can scarcely help growing wearisome. What is worse, the play is at no point notably gay. Actor Coward is by all odds Playwright Coward's greatest asset; and as a special gentleman's gentleman-or rascal's rascal-he is perfectly placed for the goofy badinage, studied insolences, posh billingsgate and pecks that leave tooth marks which are Coward's forte. And when, sporting a New Look, he is very suavely going through all the old motions...
Time Remembered (translated from the French of Jean Anouilh by Patricia Moyes) is by no means Anouilh's only play with fairy-tale trimmings. But it is the first in which the bad fairy-far from cutting up or winning out-is not even allotted a role. Though the ironist in Anouilh may jab the romantic in places, the cynic nowhere throttles him. On the contrary, Anouilh piles gilt on the gingerbread, and gives Cinderella her Prince Charming without any rushing from ballrooms or bother of trying on shoes. Indeed, if there is anything of a crooked smile...