Word: romeo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Romeo and Juliet (by William Shakespeare; a Dwight Deere Wiman production) seems Jess a play, to the world at large, than a great romantic legend. To the theater, it seems less a play than a part. No one produces it out of enthusiasm for its story alone. No one goes to see it because the Romeo is good, or stays home because he isn't. Everything centers on its not quite 14-year-old heroine; for lady stars, Juliet is a final goal and often a graveyard. There is a double hazard: the part demands the maturest art, must...
...Hollywood's Olivia de Havilland Juliet was a gallant try but a double miss. She is neither a good enough actress nor a magical enough Juliet. She never seems to feel the part-only the importance of it. She never seems in love with Romeo-only with Romeo and Juliet. She recites poetry where she should radiate it; and goes through the role as though following a score marked presto or lento, ff. or pp. It is a thoroughly modest, painstaking performance, but it just never seems to matter...
...rest of the production particularly helpful. Douglas Watson's Romeo is a little throaty and stagy. Though not the most tragic, Mercutio's is the most unfortunate death in the play, since it comes early and removes the one really dashing character (nicely played by Jack Hawkins). Thereafter, only true romantic intensity can save one of the least inevitable of tragedies from seeming one of the most protracted. The current production has a handsome but slightly heavy look, a slow and slightly heavy tread, and acting in every conceivable style...
...chance to vote for the best of three recorded Hamlets (John Gielgud, Maurice Evans, John Barrymore). As a change of pace, Ferrer promises readings from Shakespeare's sonnetts by Gielgud, Basil Rathbone, Dame Edith Evans, as well as his own interpretations of roles from Othello and Romeo and Juliet. To close his lively half-hour with a Shakespearean flourish, Puerto Rican-born Actor Ferrer took some liberties with lines from Richard...
Souvaine, apparently more interested in sentiment than mathematics, shrugs aside the fact that Rodgers' first Broadway show (A Lonely Romeo) was produced 32 years ago; his first hit (Garrick Gaieties), 26 years...