Word: shaw
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Hallmark Hall of Fame (Sun. 9 p.m., NBC). Shaw's Man and Superman, with Maurice Evans, Joan Greenwood...
Clobbered Clowns. As they made their decisions, even voters in the most hidebound areas jumped traditional party lines in pursuit of their local or regional interests. Kansas Republicans, fed up with G.O.P. factionalism, named Democrat George Docking governor over Warren Shaw (who suffered the additional liability of charges that he had taken kickbacks on gasoline sales to the state). In Republican Iowa, voters resented G.O.P. Governor Leo Hoegh's move-fast, high-tax program (TIME, Oct. 22), and elected Democrat Herschel Loveless. In West Virginia, corruption charges against the outgoing Democratic state administration resulted in the election of Republican...
Whatever the logic of it, it makes a decidedly good show. Major Barbara is full of marvelous ideological eye-foolers and glittering intellectual pinwheels and dialectical tugs of war. Beyond that, Shaw has mingled bright drawing-room chatter with sharp cockney unpleasantries, thrown in here an amusing upper-clawss idiot, there a bellowing lower-class bully...
...most dazzling facet of the new production is Charles Laughton's performance as Undershaft. He is as suave, smiling, easy of manner as he is pointed and cutting in effect. And given Shaw's fireworks, he contrives no histrionics. As the play's director, on the other hand, he has invented as many tricks of staging as has Shaw of thought. For a while the two showmen get in each other's way, though eventually they set each other off. This is partly owing to an accomplished cast, including Glynis Johns, Burgess Meredith and Eli Wallach...
...obscure reasons, is ready to die with the girl with whom he did not wish to live. Norma is usually called a singers' opera, a triumph of bel canto, and it does have magnificent vocal passages, notably two duets for the two leading female singers. But (as Bernard Shaw once said of the young Verdi) Bellini's orchestra sounds like a giant guitar; it plinkety-plinks through embarrassing military airs, mindless rages and cloying romances...