Word: shavians
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Many of Montherlant's jibes seem self-consciously Shavian...
...foregoing cheap sentiment is designed to stave off consideration of the actual event. Max Adrian is an ingratiating performer and a hardworking actor, and his night of Shavian lore (mostly letters and autobiographical fragments) really works. If it does not, on the other hand, make Shaw's presence a more vivid one, it is because the subject's real life was as a writer rather than a personality, a writer sufficiently great that his prose truly outshone his person. Under these circumstances, it is inevitable that a portrayal will seem to diminish Shaw's stature as much as it throws...
...time Her First Roman makes Broadway, all that is Bernard Shaw's will likely have been exorcised and the show no worse off for it. As is, this musicalized Caesar and Cleopatra is on so un-Shavian a wavelength that the original dialogue (nowhere close to the 80 per cent once required of Shaw's adapters) serves as Champagne to a gasoline engine. Songwriter-book writer Ervin Drake has made no try at the worshipful style of My Fair Lady: instead his idea is to set a romance in ancient Egypt and happily let it go at that. With...
...name deserved to light a lyric, "Ftatateeta" does; that Caesar and Rufio might voice their contradictory opinions of vengeance and clemency in song; and that Caesar might urge Cleopatra to be a proper queen likewise. As long as Drake doesn't appear overly concerned about the incongruity of Shavian speeches and standard musical comedy numbers, he has lots of opportunities open...
Sommer brings to the part the kind of imperious and clean elocution that we tend to think of as typically Shavian. It will be a wholly admirable performance when someone tells him that the word 'applicable' is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable and not the second...