Word: roguishly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Gwynne's Big Daddy is a man of cutting cruelty, but he lacks the roguish animal magnetism of Burl Ives in the 1955 original. Dullea is much too nerveless as Brick; his crutch upstages him. Stalwart Kate Reid rates a special citation for her earthy, grieving, raging Big Mama. But it is Elizabeth Ashley, purring, clawing, fighting for her man, who gives the play a mesmeric, electrifying intensity. ∎ T.E.K...
...story, set in California more than a century ago, is elegant and simple rather than wild and woolly: Eileen Mulkerin, an Irish widow, and her two sons, Sean, the roguish sea captain, and Michael, a nicely implacable monk, are fighting to keep their ranch at Malibu from assorted ruffians (mercifully free from squints, twitches or actual deformity). The villains do not stand a chance. They have to face the psychological weaponry of the Mulkerins' Indian friends (using ancient magical powers to scare the wits out of them). Those villains who survive face the actual hardware of other friends, "lean...
...base laps the treacherous asphalt tide of the urban jungle. This translates into dance numbers with the slashing tempi of switchblades, though none are shown or used. Hookers, casual muggings and cops as cynical as the wink of an eye breeze across the stage, less in menace than in roguish mockery. Never mind if any of this is strictly true; it matches the urban mythos of the moment, and provides the musical comedy brass to go with the plot's violins...
...Hamlet, the supporting players have no choice but to be supporting players, yet in this production one sometimes wonders if they are supporting Hamlet. As Claudius, James Earl Jones has evolved an eccentric interpretation, bubbling with some roguish interior humor and bursting into toothy, malicious glee. Given a riding crop, he might be the head of an old Hollywood studio rather than the ruler of a realm. An oddly placid Colleen Dewhurst makes Gertrude seem more the painted than the panting queen. Barnard Hughes' Polonius is the traditional chalk-dust didactician, but Kitty Winn's mad scene does...
...turn of the century, thatchers were stock characters in nearly every village in the southern half of England. "They're a lonely sort of people," says Dodson, whose family have been thatchers for generations in the village of Huntingdon near Cambridge. "They've always been a roguish lot who'd just as soon poach from the local squire as earn money thatching...