Word: shaw
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...BEASTLY wet day in Folkestone, England, eighty years ago and George Bernard Shaw is snivelling in his hotel room about the opening performance of Arms and the Man the night before. "I had the curious experience of witnessing an apparently insane success," he laments in a letter to Henry Arthur Jones, "with the actors and actresses almost losing their heads with the intoxication of laugh after laugh, and of going before the curtain to tremendous applause, the only person in the theatre who knew that the whole affair was a ghastly failure." Poor Shaw was to tussle, with benighted audiences...
Which is not to say that this is a bad production. The actors seem to relate to each other superbly, and the performance moves quickly and comically with no lulls. That Arms and the Man withstands such a shallow rendering is quite a testimony to Shaw's wit. For even if the production does not broach the significant themes of war and romance that exist in the play, it does execute a nice variation on the old country mouse/city mouse story. Bluntschli, you see, is the unscrupulous and urbane businessman (in the course of the play, he inherits the proprietorship...
...tongued lout in Look Back in Anger, the 1956 marital psychomelodrama by her first husband, Playwright John Osborne. She went on to give other strong performances in films (Sons and Lovers) and on stage (Duel of Angels, Old Times), sometimes co-starring with her second husband, Actor-Playwright Robert Shaw...
Arms and the Man. Shaw hits the Mainstage again, in one of his classic intellectual comedies about a Bulgarian nobleman who writes an operetta called The Chocolate Soldier because he loads his revolver with chocolate. Shaw outraged public opinion with this play by revealing that Bulgarians of high social position did not bathe. The director is the very accomplished Evangline Morphos, but the Mainstage's penchant for competent, unexciting productions of good but not great plays will probably not be reversed. Tonight through Sunday at 8 p.m. as well as next week...
Ellen Burstyn glows with womanhood and the understanding of life that comes from having weathered life's storms. Her performance has an unstrained authority and is resonant with insight. She would make a marvelous Candida if some astute producer chose to revive the Shaw classic. Grodin is a kind of Dagwood uncharacteristically blessed with a heart and a mind. His manifest desire to do the right thing by both his absent wife and Doris contributes visibly to the felt compassion of the play. Rarely have a man and a woman on a stage mixed the honey of love...