Word: stella
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...crowds stormed the box office of West Berlin's Renaissance Theater without success: the four-week limited engagement of Jerome Kilty's Dear Liar had been sold out overnight. Based on the series of "wicked, wicked letters" that George Bernard Shaw exchanged over the years with Actress Stella (Mrs. Patrick) Campbell, the play crackled with the thrust and parry of Shavian wit neatly done in German. But for once G.B.S. himself was being upstaged by an even more powerful drawing card: famed Viennese Actress Elisabeth Bergner, 59, emerging from semiretirement to score the triumph of her career...
...notch support from German Actor Otto Hasse as Shaw, Bergner limns the famous affair-by-letter, beginning in 1912, when Actress Campbell, at the height of her fame and beauty, was writing to her "Joey the Clown" about appearing in his Pygmalion, through the declining days in Hollywood (where Stella was like "some sinking frigate firing broadside after broadside at anyone who tried to help her"), to the year before Stella's bitter, poverty-stricken death in a Pyrenees village in 1940, when the 83-year-old Shaw wrote a plaintive curtain line...
Columbia dips into Donizetti's over flowing old trunk of 70-odd operas and comes up with a 3-LP recording of Linda di Chamounix (mono). Written late in the composer's life, the work has a good deal of facile melody, and Antonietta Stella, Renato Capecchi and Cesare Valletti give it a rousing performance. But the libretto, which has to do with a girl driven mad when wrongly accused of being a wanton, is enough to shake anybody but the staunchest Donizetti...
Chase Crosley makes a sweet and loving Stella. As a matter of fact, she seems to be the only character who is allowed to have any compassion for anything. Sydney Sturgess and Ralph Drischell provide some humorous moments, particularly in their raucous offstage fight, which is highlighted by Miss Humphrey's perfectly timed question, "Did he kill...
...that a dusty curtain divided it in half, and on the working side there were still 1,310 seats. It was hardly the setting for an intimate, sophisticated new drama: Dear Liar, an adaptation by Actor Jerome Kilty of the famed letters between George Bernard Shaw and Victorian Actress Stella (Mrs. Patrick) Campbell. Nor was it precisely right for the stars: clip-toned Brian Aherne playing opposite no less a grande dame than Katharine Cornell, resplendent in velvet gowns by Cecil Beaton...