Word: stella
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Seventh Heaven (music and lyrics by Victor Young and Stella Unger; book by Victor Wolfson and Miss Unger; based on the play by Austin Strong) never, with the help of music, achieves the schmalz that the play and movie versions achieved without it. The idyl of a young girl of the Paris slums and a sort of young king of the sewers-who comes home blind, at the end, after World War I-leaves the audience not only dry-eyed but pretty heavy-lidded. It even lacks the appeal of something sweetly out of date. The reason, perhaps, - is that...
...lyrics by Stella Unger are similarly undistinguished. (A representative sample went something like, "I'll fly from the blue horizon/ to the isle of I-love-you.") Miss Unger also co-authored the book, together with Victor Wolfson, basing it on a memorable old tear-jerker of a play which was later made into a movie. The present rehashing of the story about a World War I affair between a chanteuse of doubtful reputation and a Parisian sewer-cleaner has lost most of the pathetic appeal of the original. Instead, the authors introduce a trio of prostitutes for comedy relief...
Last week, after consulting several handbooks (including What Shall We Name the Baby?), Hogan and helpers put out the new 1955 list of hurricane names: Alice, Brenda, Connie. Diane. Edith. Flora, Gladys, Hilda, lone, Janet, Katie, Linda, Martha, Nelly, Orva, Peggy, Queena. Rosa, Stella, Trudy, Ursa, Verna, Wilma, Xenia, Yvonne and Zelda. Only holdover: Alice, used because an out-of-season hurricane arrived before its name was chosen...
...feminine leads, played by Bronia Sielewicz and Leslie Cass, seem considerably more at case on the stage. As rivals for swift's as Vanessa, is the emotional woman, quite ready to display her feelings; Miss Siclewicz, as Stella, creates the picture of the persecuted wife, quite proud of her own suffering. Other members of the cast could be singled out for varying degrees of competency. Catherine Huntington, for instance, contributes a fine monologue in the last act, as she reads to an insane Doctor swift. And Edward Finnegan is suitably foolish as the pompous Dr. Berkley...
Playwright Reeves gets just serious enough in Wedding Breakfast to make things ring false. Though his double story in one sense shrieks its contrasts in values, he never really probes or assesses them, for one thing because both his heroines are the next thing to caricatures. But beyond that, Stella's story emerges as merely rigged up, as movie romance pretending to be a problem play, as Boy Meets Girl striking the attitudes of Character Is Fate. Even as romance, it is needlessly shabby: by the time a guy walks out on a girl twice, the playwright, at least...