Word: tarletons
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Shaw is up to all these tricks in Misalliance, one of his wildly irrepressible comedies. The drawing room belongs to John Tarleton (Philip Bosco), a self-made millionaire. Tarleton is an omnivorous reader and an avid fox hunter of ideas...
When he spots one, his shout is not "Yoicks," but "Read Kipling"-"Read Dickens"-"Read Ibsen"-"Read Mrs. Browning." Of course, being Shavians, Tarleton and the eight other whiz-tongued characters in the play have no time to read. Wittily, polemically, almost lyrically, they talk talk talk talk talk. This exuberant cascade engulfs such subjects as parents and children, the guerrilla war between the sexes, love and marriage, feminism, socialism and capitalism, the new technology (circa 1909) and how to tell a gentleman from...
...country home of the Tarleton clan seems demolition-proof. John Tarleton (Sandy Webster), self-made head of Tarleton's Underwear, is a man of irrepressible élan vital to whom skeptic thought is the champagne of the mind...
...Tarleton's daughter Hypatia (Deborah Kipp) is so restless under the inane constraints imposed on a gentlewoman that she has become engaged to a man who is a shrill teakettle of immaturity. When a handsome aviator (Geraint-Wyn Davies) and his Polish acrobat passenger (Carole Shelley) enter the Tarleton drawing room after their plane crashes into the greenhouse, verbal gunfire begins to crackle all along Shaw's battlefront...
This is an uneven production. The high spot is Webster's Tarleton, a figure of dynamic animal magnetism and a dauntless fox hunter of ideas. Drawn to the aviator, Kipp's Hypatia is more coquette than carnivore in her pursuit.While the clever flow of the Shavian line defies damming. Director Christopher Newton permits intellectual comedy to be diverted into farce. No matter how funny Shaw may be, his truest punch line is moral passion. - T.E.K