Word: shavianly
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...about it. For a long time, this column has felt that Shaw's contempt for his public has showed itself in his music, he not bothering to play anything but noisy, trite stuff. Mr. Shaw has said that he wanted to get out of the music business. The above Shavian comments should take care of that very nicely. As far as we are concerned, I'affaire Shaw is a closed book, as we suspect Mr. Shaw will be shortly...
...movie is presented to the public with such a blast of trumpets and publicity, for John Q. gets the impression that it is a picture of world-shaking implications. Certainly there is nothing super-colossal about "Pygmalion," and in that very fact lies its charm. There is plenty of Shavian paradoxical comment on Humanity if anyone cares to look for it, but certainly it is not thrown out into the audience's lap. Bouquets by the carload should go to Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller for their performances. Howard's comedy is in his best style, and Miss Hiller...
...high Shavian wit is Androcles entertaining, but for low Shavian tom-foolery-particularly near the end when the play bursts its buttons, when Ferrovius licks all the gladiators in sight, when Androcles waltzes with the lion, when Caesar is chased by it, claims the credit for taming it, orders everybody to turn Christian. Such high jinks do not make one wonder what Shaw "means" by it all; they make one wonder whether he may not have had a hand in Hellzapoppin...
Principal changes were in the last act, which Shaw cut to a third of its length, almost completely rewrote. What made the London audience sit up was not the clatter of the Shavian blank verse but a sly passage whose political patness even the dullest Britisher could...
...very pensive, to the Tower and soon comes----to take me to the Opera House to see Saint Joan. A mighty chronicle play it is with sparklingly conversation in good Shavian style. Yet I did not like the River Loire scene which is weak with miracles, not the epilogue, it being too openly didactic. But Katharine Cornell, though not saintly enough as Joan, does make the Maid a convincing martyr...