Word: slighter
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Harvard Economics Professor SUMNER SLIGHTER...
...Hunter) was a success in London, where the cast-including Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ralph Richardson, Dame Sybil Thorndike and Irene Worth-was dazzling. On Broadway, where the cast is merely good, the play's chances seem slighter. A prettily draped Dorsetshire study of has-beens and never-weres, a Chekhov-flavored and slightly watery custard, A Day by the Sea is often nicely written, sometimes neatly observed. But it shows no very personal talent or original insight...
Strauss: Wiener Blut (Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Erich Kunz, Emmy Loose, Nicolai Gedda; Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus under Otto Ackermann; Angel, 3 sides of 2 LPs). Not so grand a ball as Die Fledermaus, Johann Strauss's masterpiece, this operetta is slighter but in spots even more delightful. A composite of Strauss music not originally written for the stage, the score is full of surprises: when sung, some of the waltzes and polkas take on a warbling charm they do not have as orchestra pieces alone. The libretto is preposterous, but offers linguists an unusually rich sampling of Viennese slang...
...Enchanted (adapted from the French of the late Jean Giraudoux by Maurice Valency; produced by David Lowe & Richard Davidson), whatever its weaknesses as a play, is frequently enchanting. A fantasy, as was Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot, it uses a much slighter and more tremulous fable. Instead of grandly and wackily turning Paris upside down, it delicately turns existence inside out. Half the play merely suggests and evokes, like music; even the solider half is mostly talk...
...those novelists who wish to leave the reader's complacency in tatters. At his best, he is brilliantly artful at it. His By the Waters of Babylon (TIME, July i, 1940) remains a classic work of fiction on the lives of European Jews. Children of Vienna, a much slighter story, is addressed, says Vienna-born Author Neumann, "to the men and women of the victorious countries"-especially to any who have failed to imagine life in the rubble "east of the Meridian of Despair...