Word: twain
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Fascinating Experiment. With them approved, CBS agreed to make what Producer Norman Twain (Bajour) called "a substantial, six-figure investment" in what was to be a $650,000 production. The timetable was set. Rehearsals would begin in January, followed by an out-of-town shakedown in Philadelphia and = the Broadway opening March...
...Greatest Musical Ever Sung: is it a newspaper's business to avoid "bad taste" or to report on what is happening and the manner in which it happens? I am surprised that three professors of English-men who have to do professionally with Swift, Brecht, Poyce, Mark Twain-signed a letter identifying as "arrogance" and nothing else the expression of scorn (if it was that: the musical's title indicates parody) for what others hold sacred. The "sacred" is a function of the collective consciousness; as such it is bound at intervals to fall into decay and to be visited...
...Hamlin's actors seem to have jumped into the project with as much enthusiasm as Tom Sawyer's gang out on a midnight patrol-Tom, you'll remember, was himself something of a Dumas freak-and though it's all still as ridiculous and decadent as even Mark Twain could see, it's also still somehow innocent enough to set off a goodly amount of villain-hissing and hero-hurrahs in the correspondingly enthusiastic audience...
...reader must do Geismar's real job for him. If he is familiar with Kaplan's study and the Autobiography, he can pick his way through this book and arrive at a reasonable explanation of the strange shape of Twain's career. Twain's outlook darkened and grew harsher in the last half of his life. During much of the same period he endured a harrowing succession of business catastrophes and deaths in his family. At the same time, as Geismar points out, U.S. society-Twain's raw material -was also changing. The young agrarian...
Geismar quotes great caustic batches of Twain's later prose, to show that he was an angry prophet who saw his republic choked by the corporate state. But Twain never did arrive at a consistent view of his world. As early as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, his feeling toward the technological society was widely ambivalent. He admired technology; he despised it. The U.S. was corrupted; it was the hope of the world. Man was a splendid fellow; man was changelessly evil. His own life reflected these inconsistencies. He delivered a fine speech lampooning accident...