Word: vestale
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Jimmy Porter's women should be alike and they weren't. Alison and Helena are well-bred, stiff, a little nervous -- they'll have an aura of vestal virginity about them forever. But Emily Sisson (Alison) played a trembly faun while Tracy Goss. (Helena) played a la-de-dah matron. So at the end we concentrated on an antique question: which type woman will Jimmy wind up with? Instead we should be watching Jimmy's final gesture of abandon...
Poor Atalanta. She doesn't want to marry anybody, ever. She doesn't even want to stay at the College of Vestal Virgins, as the Dean (Nick Whitlam) keeps urging. No, Atalanta wants to be a famous athlete, and most any day you'll find her practicing the various track and field events she plans to enter in the next Olympiad...
...best of all on opening night was Nick Whitlam as the head Vestal, a booming games mistress who almost, but not quite, succeeds in establishing military discipline over her violent sexual frustrations. With a technique born of fastidious hard-sell he leads the chorus through the show's finest numbers, You're Only A Virgin Once and the kick line, Love Me, Love My Cult. Here, Steve Kaplan's lyrics, by the by, are all things wonderful, and one forgives and forgets his occasional carelessness in other parts of the production...
...vulgar spectacle. "It was for a purse of $150," reminisced Referee Jack Sheean, "and I matched Knucksey Doherty of Donegal Square with Tim Harrington of Cambridge and told them to be themselves. I figured some of those sedate, quietly dressed society women would scream or faint, but the vestal virgins in the Coliseum never looked on with more calm than these high and haughty dames as they watched these two babies murder each other...
...earnest if somewhat amateurish biography, Yvette is finally portrayed in truer colors. She was nearer vestal than scarlet. As a critic noted at the time, the onstage illusion Yvette so shatteringly evoked was of knowing virginity; as stage-door admirers soon discovered, it was no illusion...