Word: schweik
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Thanks to Anouilh's vividly ironic vision, much of the evening is howlingly funny. Wallach has always possessed perfect comic pitch and he displays it again here. However, he lacks that certain panache which makes St. Pé a duelist with destiny rather than a Good Soldier Schweik taking fate's pratfalls. Jackson is an awesome virago who delivers her lines like bayonet thrusts...
...though, Masaryk bore too much responsibility and was too aristocratic to play the lowly Schweik for long. Though it was not his fault, he failed tragically to live up to Schweik's cardinal rule: "Always try to outlive the enemy; dying will get you nowhere...
SCHWEYK IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR is not altogether unlike the Good Soldier Schweik of W.W.I, but Bertolt Brecht made him a subject of even broader comedy. Woodstock...
...work stoppages, with drastic losses for Czechoslovakia's already ailing economy, factory laborers relit blast furnaces and returned to their work benches. The 10 p.m.-to-5 a.m. curfew was lifted. Nightclubs and cinemas reopened. One showed My Fair Lady, but another slyly screened The Good Soldier Schweik. Svelte bar girls in scalloped miniskirts or skintight trousers flitted through the cocktail lounge at Prague's Esplanade Hotel. The juggler was even back in action at Prague's Tetran club, though he tended to drop more plates than usual...
...second half of the program was a definite improvement over the first. Both the works had been played at previous concerts, and performances were generally brighter and more confident. The Wind Ensemble reappeared with Robert Kurka's Suite from The Good Soldier Schweik. This basically tonal work, composed in 1956, treads perilously close to eclecticism as it attempts to combine all the classic styles of twentieth century music: the playful dissonance of Prokofieff, the biting sarcasm of Mahler, a Milhaud-like use of jazz, and insistent rhythms at once reminiscent of Igor Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein. Combined with the nearly...