Word: regents
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...First Gentleman, also known as the Prince Regent and George IV of England, is shown chiefly as a father in Norman Ginsbury's period piece. For two acts the rakish, selfish, stylish Regent insists that Princess Charlotte marry the Prince of Orange, before giving her the Prince Leopold she loves. There are gaudy family scenes-the best one between an unhappy, runaway Charlotte and her unhappier, cast-aside mother-preceding Charlotte's death in childbed...
...always fat and fatuous, the sometime companion of Sheridan and Fox who adorned as well as tarnished a picturesque society. His maudlin lament, after Charlotte's death, that he can father no royal line, seems both needless and out of character in the father of Regent Street and Regent's Park, the Brighton Pavilion and Waterloo Place...
...drops in unfortunate streaks of tragedy and melodrama. Much of this seems due to unwillingness to write his own play--he lets history control too much of the plot, and too rarely selects or rejects events or details. He makes a sprawling leap into the life of the prince regent (the future King George IV) of England, and hopes, evidently, that a comedy with serious scenes and historical validity will emerge. Instead, he creates an amorphous opus with no real line or arch from beginning to end, and he obscures the comedy...
...prince regent, a splendidly overdebauched plum of pomposity, has a marriageable daughter, Charlotte. She wants a poor prince; her father wants a rich prince. She runs away to her mother, a drunken escapee from Tennessee Williams. The mother scene is not at all badly acted, but its depressing, maudlin effect is absurdly bad for the play...
Charlotte returns to daddy; the prince regent is won over; Charlotte marries her true love. This would be a safe, traditional spot to end a comedy. But, as hardly any members of History 142b (and even fewer members of the audience) remember, actually Charlotte promptly died in childbirth, saddening her father, frustrating his hopes for begetting a line of kings, and leading to the accession of a devious niece called Victoria...