Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Angela Lansbury, a doll who refuses to be anything but living, plays the Madwoman as if the character existed in the script and score. She nearly makes it in the first act, and in the second, she takes flight (with some help from a Herman ballad, the only song in the show that works). Frocked in costumes that look like mountains of lace and sporting a crazy carrot-colored wig, Miss Lansbury still cannot help but be beautiful. Despite the unhappy things she has to do in Dear World, you have to love...
Most of the performers just hang around, hoping that Lawrence, Lee, or Herman might throw a bone their way. The usually redoubtable Milo O'Shea can't do a thing with the pale Sewerman, for example. And when O'Shea can't breathe life into a script, that's a sure sign the script is dead...
...Thanks for the high-camp comic relief, "On Running New York" [Nov. 1]. The counterpoint of describing Lindsay laughing over a column on "pseudo intellectuals," and then having him quote Dickens and Yeats was inspired. For those of us who have heard hizzoner try to articulate without a script, this new-found eloquence came as a real surprise. Add a wife who sounds the dinner bell in French, sherry for lunch, and a picture of our boy John in tails at the Met, and you have the ingredients for a clever burlesque of J.F.K. and Jackie...
Despite the script, The Lion in Winter often succeeds, primarily because of its stars. O'Toole, as the cunning, quirky King Henry, explodes with lofty authority when he catches his snarling cubs trying to unseat the old lion, or when he condemns his malign wife to lifelong imprisonment. As Eleanor, Hepburn is, at 59, unmistakably Hepburn; the quavering accent is still as prominent as her cheekbones. But she adds to what might have been simply a personality portrayal a sly, dry delivery that breaks her brittle dialogue in all the right places. As she mocks herself in a hand...
Sorensen doeen't have much luck with the staging either. After the painfully clear exposition of the robbery in the script, it's pointless to accent the obvious by having two scenes close with Paul malevolently eyeing the safe...