Word: shrews
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...London's Middle Temple Hall, which a few weeks ago was struck by a Nazi bomb. Neither bombs nor centuries seriously alter Shakespeare's comedy. It can be richly indecent as in Measure for Measure, swift and slapstick as in The Taming of the Shrew. It can also be very mild, very mannered-as in Twelfth Night. The Guild production of the play is exquisite, but the net effect is that of a high ritual of antique jokes...
...important political columnists were daily comparing the nomination of anyone but Willkie to the Fall of France-Ray Clapper, Mark Sullivan, Arthur Krock, Dorothy Thompson, Walter Lippmann, Westbrook Pegler, Hugh Johnson. Even the coldest, toughest of all, nail-hard Frank Kent told them flatly in his old-shrew style that, while Herbert Hoover was the best man, Wendell Willkie was the only winning candidate...
...only daughter. Before the hoopla has subsided, Mazeppa, traditionally played by a curve-some female, has been tied to a "fiery Tartarian steed." headed precipitously away from the lone Polish prairie. Enacted in Suffern by the papier-mache horse used by the Lunts in their Taming of the Shrew, the role of the high-tempered stallion is reduced to comic relief. But riding one of his flesh-&-blood predecessors back in the 1860s, Adah Isaacs Menken, most celebrated Mazeppa of them all, was bruised on many occasions by being thrown, kicked, stepped on. As Mazeppa, the well-made Menken used...
...opening of The Taming of the Shrew in Los Angeles, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne gave swishy latecomers the works. As each laggard strolled or strutted down the aisle, Lunt & Fontanne stopped dead in their lines, she to bow graciously, he to cry "Welcome!" Once he said: "For the benefit of those people who just came in, I'll play the scene again...
Only one falls flat. That nobody can do anything with the puerile plot of The Comedy of Errors was shown this season when Rodgers & Hart found it the snag in their otherwise delightful The Boys from Syracuse. But the Old Globe's The Taming of the Shrew picks up enormously by having Kate take the count within 45 minutes, becomes, indeed, an exuberant comic-strip courtship. Best of the four productions is A Midsummer Night's Dream...