Word: shavianly
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Misalliance, a bright union of acid dialogue and fanciful plot, serves as a scrap-book for assorted bits of Shavian philosophy. Skimming over anything profound, the play is an agreeable jumble of Shaw's acumen and nonsense. By exaggerating speech and gestures, the Broadway version has heightened the whimsey and strengthened the plot...
...mere writing apparently cleared the Shavian atmosphere, and now he speaks quite calmly about his early phobias. "Of course I was contemptuous of the crowds," he says. "I was so insecure I thought they were yelling for something that was beneath contempt. The same thing goes for my marriages: I felt that any woman who loved me couldn't be any good, or she wouldn't want me. Now I think I can build a real marriage, and I think I am. And now, I can play what people want me to-but I play...
While Mr. Cotten and Miss Sullavan are up-braiding the producer for tricking them into Sabrina Fair, the two stars might have a word with author Samuel Taylor. Taylor has provided them with a parody of Shavian comedy. Shaw's good-natured snobbery, his interminable stretches of dialogue, his predictable surprise ending are all belabored here. Lacking only is Shaw's sincerity and wit: In the part forced on Cotten, the "superman" seems barely capable of running his own life. And any clever lines are spare indeed, while almost-clever lines pop up again and again to mar the play...
Miss McNamara is a Shavian adolescent transplanted to American and come of age. She is an excellent cook; "cleanliness next to Godliness," she says, and subscribes to Tennyson's three virtues of faith, hope and chastity. Added to these is a charming sophistication; she speaks knowingly of a "mother instinct," and has gone to school of Freud and D. H. Lawrence...
Bouncing Grandpa. Who is Zorba? He is Everyman with a Greek accent. He is Sinbad crossed with Sancho Panza. He is the Shavian Life Force poured into a long, lean, fierce-mustached Greek whose 65 years in the Mediterranean sun have neither dimmed his hawk eyes nor dulled his pagan laughter. From the moment when he pounces on the nameless narrator of the story with an abrupt offer-"Taking me with you? ... I can make soups you've never heard or thought of"-Zorba makes the heroes of most modern fiction seem like dyspeptic ghosts...