Word: venusized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Interplanetary News. Teaching the Neighbors a system of numerals Hogben calls his "fresher" (freshman) course. For his sophomore course he casts about for some other topic that earthlings have in common with their Neighbors. The best one, he thinks, is astronomy. The "Venetians" (inhabitants of Venus), who supposedly live at the bottom of an opaque atmosphere, may know nothing about the sky, but the Martians should. Their atmosphere is clearer than the earth...
Lahr's best scenes, though, are worth the price of a balcony seat. His Space Brigade parodies TV sciencefiction programs to perfection as he wisecracks with the Queen of Venus and her Venusmen. Again in The Clown, Lahr soliloquizes as a cross-eyed Pagliacci, clowns through a superdeadpan imitation of Rudolph Valentino in Sapanish costume, and mimics a stately Spanish dance while peering down the front of a dancing partner twice his height. It is Lahr's grimaces, pantomine, and periodic exclamations ("Gonggg") that put these scenes across. The frequent appearance of six G-strung showgirls adds the final touch...
...Venus Observed (by Christopher Fry) shows the author of The Lady's Not for Burning enmeshed in the bright, shiny seaweed of his own talents. Venus is a play about love and a philandering English duke who decides to settle down by choosing a bride from his long line of former mistresses. But he is smitten by his estate manager's fair young daughter, and loses...
Love would dominate Venus if language did not drench it. Language is Fry's own true love, and Venus catches the glow of poetry, the mocking glints of parody, the flashing of rhetoric and the shimmer of wit. Amid such a tangle of traffic lights, traffic itself snarls, detours and halts. In The Lady's Not for Burning, with its medieval echoes and broomstick leaps of witchcraft and romance, Fry could be simultaneously prankster and poet, could spoof the very verse he spouted. But Venus Observed is modern, sophisticated, drawing-room bred, .and its ironies, at times, stare...
There are many charming speeches and effects; there are bright stunts like a slowly uncoiling sentence 293 words long. But on the stage the play lacks pace and flow, the detail eats up the design. Venus is none the better for Sir Laurence Olivier's irresolute staging, which leaves most of the cast uncharacterized and even Lilli Palmer living entirely off charm. The splendid exceptions are Rex Harrison as the duke and John Williams as the estate manager. Fry, in his own words, is here coruscating on thin ice; and he has forgotten Emerson's warning that...