Word: shrewed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...three-hour film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, last week the amount of potential ennui the U. S. amusement industry was about to sell its patrons was terrific. Just at that critical hour the Theatre Guild offered Alfred Lunt & Lynn Fontanne in The Taming of the Shrew. Here, in good faith, was a pleasant comedy to bar a thousand harms and lengthen life...
...Lunts' somewhat radical notion that The Shrew needed gaiety and bounce. Accordingly, they have resurrected the possibly anachronistic "Induction," which begins the piece with a troupe of jolly players marching into a nobleman's house with drums and cymbals to beguile him for an evening. In true Elizabethan style, the tale of Petruchio and his truculent bride Katharine is interrupted from time to time while tumblers, a tenor, a troupe of midgets take the stage. Within the play itself, the Lunts have felt free to bring in any amount of extraneous horseplay that might add freshness...
This is the first of eight Shakespeare plays docketed on Broadway for this season, including Producer Gaige's Macbeth which follows Othello, Leslie Howard in Hamlet, the Lunts in The Taming of the Shrew,* Katharine Cornell again in Romeo & Juliet. Such able actors and their enterprising producers are currently creating something of a Shakespeare revival and proving that senescence is no proper criterion of ability to interpret the Bard that his plays are not only fine literature which can be declaimed with distinction but meaty melodramas which can be acted with vitality. Miss Cornell's glowing performance last...
...Shrew's furious scenes last week in Philadelphia, Lynn Fontanne Lunt tore a cartilage in her knee, played the rest of the week with her knee in a tight bandage...
...impersonated by big-eyed, golden-haired Actress Helen Chandler, Angela Shale is a young woman who looks like an angel out of Heaven, but generally acts like the most mischievous little shrew who ever sat on a ducking stool. By tears, coquetry, wheedling, imprecations, she is bound and determined to make her husband sell his electrical invention to the power trust, accept a steady job and settle down in an all-electric house in the suburbs. Alternately dazzled by his wife's charm and enraged by her breezy feminine sophistry, Dick Shale (Bramwell Fletcher) is equally determined to exploit...