Word: simpleton
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...resonant Tonio, alternately strutting and servile as he paced in front of the curtain and expounded Leoncavallo's advice to the audience that an actor is "a man with a heart like yours," and that "what he tells you is true." Playing Tonio with vacuous smile as a simpleton rather than a physical cripple, Warren shot the role full of pity which honed rather than blunted its edge of evil. In his great self-revelatory aria ("I know I'm deformed and ugly"), his mahogany-hued voice soared with a passion and authority that no other baritone today...
...surprising results was his suggestion, in The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, that "the Godhead must contain the Mother as well as the Father." Dame Laurentia was outraged at the thought of deifying Mary, and took him to task. "You want me, as if it were a sort of penance, to say a lot of Hail Maries," he flashed back. "But I am always saying Hail, Mary! on my travels ... I say it in my own natural and sincere way when She turns up in the temples and tombs of Egypt and among the gods of Hindustan-Hallo, Mary...
...prison, cost him his fortune in millions and, finally, made him a sort of walking effigy of liberty. To realists like Mirabeau, who tried to take over the revolution, Lafayette's "only ambition is to be praised," and to Napoleon, Lafayette was "a bit of a simpleton...
Peace descends only when Malachy, the Patrickstown simpleton, is vouchsafed a vision of the Virgin, and the populace turns from litigation to religion. Not, however, before the Irish, who stand "on the periphery of chaos," move into dead center and, in the book's most comic turn, infect the Sassenach with their own fey reasoning. "The bog water is rapidly rising in my brain," Butler finds, and obedient to the hypnosis that compels non-Irish reporters to write in a kind of stage Irish when describing St. Patrick's Day parades, he begins to talk in the wild...
...died) is a bit too much for Jack Kaufman at this time. He has not yet learned how to match his voice and actions to the age of his part. Robert Leibacher, aided by a red wig and appropriately pasty makeup, is fine as the simpleton Thomas; and Lake Bobbitt, with literally a seven-inch nose, paints a wonderful picture of the palsied President of the Medical Faculty in the epilogue...