Word: stepchildren
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...Curious Savage (by John Patrick; produced by the Theatre Guild & Russell Lewis & Howard Young) tackles a tempting and dangerous theme. The scene is an elegant mental institution, the story chiefly about an eccentric rich widow (amusingly played by Lillian Gish) whose stepchildren want to keep her from disposing capriciously of their father's fortune. Before being confined, she has contrived to hide the money; and the play proceeds at several interrogatory levels: 1) a farcical one of Where Is the Fortune?; 2) a psychological one of How Mad Is the Lady?; 3) a philosophical one of Is Sanity...
...play as a whole suffers badly from a frantic mixture of styles (all the way from George Abbott to Barrie) and from a sameness of subject matter. The "guests" at the Cloisters can only trot out their obsessions; the old lady can only defy and deceive her stepchildren. And the staging, which might have given the play a nice airy unreality, makes most of it noisily blunt...
...Literary Stepchildren...
...agree heartily with Psychologist Don C. Charles that the stepchildren in U.S. literature are our schoolteachers [TIME, April 3]. Furthermore, I feel that if they were pictured more truly and appealingly, taxpayers would raise their salaries, and ambitious youngsters would enter the profession...
Schuman, who still finds time to compose despite his duties as president of Manhattan's Juilliard School of Music and director of publications for music publishers G. Schirmer, Inc., did not quite want to say his latest work was his best: "I have no stepchildren; if I slighted one work, it would feel hurt." But he had tried to compose a work "on the highest musical plane, exploiting the virtuosity of the violin and not just showing it off." The concerto had, he said, "a good deal of melody-and melody is the bread and butter of music...