Word: sybillants
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...Sybil Ramsing...
...never replay their headline-grabbing love affair again. For last week, at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas (what could be more romantic?), Burton wed his companion of the past 18 months, Sally Hay, 35. It was Burton's fifth reading of the wedding vows. (Past partners: Sybil Williams, Taylor, Taylor again, and Susan Hunt.) After learning of the marriage, Taylor, whose current consort is Mexican Lawyer Victor Luna, pursed her lips into a smile and said, "I've known all along they would be married and happy together...
Five years before Elyot meets the disagreeing Sybil, and before Private Lives begins, Elyot and Amanda divorce. As the play opens, the two are newly remarried, he to Sybil (Katryn Walker), she to Victor Prynne (John Cullum). Embarrassingly enough, both couples honeymoon in Deauville. Worse yet, their respective suites share a balcony. But Elyot is as unsuited for the flighty, girlish Sybil as Amanda is for the formal, gentlemanly Victor. While Amanda and Elyot rediscover their old love. Coward argues, always humorously, that passion often blends both tenderness and hostility. And the tender and hostile moments in the Private Lives...
...with accomplished performers Cullum, who won Tony Awards for Shenandoah and On the Twentieth Century, blends naivete with an almost treacly love for Amanda to create a character who seems unbeatable despite his efforts to the contrary. With a breathless voice, and a fey, almost stupid demeanor. Walker's Sybil seems both attractive and repellent. Much of Private Lives' fun results from watching Sybil evolve as the play unfolds. Walker's confidence--and gestures that skirt the melodramatic but manage to remain realistic firmly anchor her character, if only in space. But as good as Walker...
TAYLOR's performance, like her voice, is uneven. She drops octaves at will, often with little purpose, and the almost sing-song nature of her voice makes her sound at one moment girlish, at another manly. Yet often her guttural inflections serve her well, as she threatens either Sybil or Elyot. Burton fares better, for he avoids Taylor's tendency to slip into broad, overstated gestures. However, Burton's disinterested demeanor occasionally seems to reflect a boredom with his part. And his and Taylor's hostile interludes lead to the play's most unintentionally humorous moments...