Word: shakespeareans
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...leading Shakespearean actor of this time, Maurice Evans, plays the pompous Malvolio with his usual moist, resonant subtlety of speech. He also adopts a Cockney accent that undoubtedly makes the labored humor of the part more amusing than it really is. Into the pronunciation of the single word '"Run?" he manages to crowd an enormous amount of haughty comedy...
...play's humor is weak, its potential charm is great, and the Guild's leading players are perfectly at home in the blandishing groove. Helen Hayes makes her Broadway Shakespearean debut (two years ago she played Portia in Chicago) in the role of Viola, who, in boy's clothes, pleads the amorous cause of the Duke of Illyria, Orsino, whom she loves herself. There is little in the part to show Miss Hayes's powers as an upper-case Shakespearean Actress. She scores merely by being Helen Hayes, very feminine despite her striped pantaloons, giving...
...Shakespearean Directrix Margaret Webster who also did Evans's Richard II, Hamlet and Henry IV, Part I, has done her usual best by the Bard. Stewart Chancy has designed Italianate landscapes that loom softly behind the players. Paul Bowles, among the up-&-coming young American composers, has written lingering music for Shakespeare's songs, celebrating love and death with flute, oboe, harp, harpsichord, percussion and muted trumpet. The Bard, in his latest Broadway manifestation, has got all the breaks a playwright could wish. The audience's rewards are less solid...
There he stayed. Senator Henry Fountain Ashurst became a Washington character. Tall, with the suave manner of a Shakespearean actor, he gave up his cowboy clothes for sleek, striped trousers, spade-tailed coat, pince-nez on a wide black ribbon. His speeches were orations, models of polysyllabic splendor. He described himself as a "veritable peripatetic bifurcated volcano in behalf of the principles of my party." But meatily between the thick-hunked verbiage were sandwiched slices of wit and wisdom. He was one man who dared to tackle rough-&-tumble Huey Long in debate on the Senate floor. He left...
...Yunnan recently, I asked a Chinese what he thought of things generally in the world. Being a businessman rather than a scholar or an official and having come from South China he replied in pidgin English "Belly bad. Can do, no can do, what fashion?" which translated into good Shakespearean English reads "Very bad. To be or not to be. That is the question." In Hong Kong, I asked a Chinese what the Chinese thought of the Japanese. He replied "Chinaman think Japanman no got proper savvy box." I notice the American public has been indulging freely in Confucian sayings...