Word: vic
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...gentle, mildly charming production that Michael Benthall has directed for the Old Vic, the love poetry and the subtly melancholy atmosphere it distills form the pervading element, and the contrasting comic elements are very much played down. There is a distinct lack of any sort of vitality, but in Twelth Night vitality can be ruinous if not restrained, and its absence can be borne. The most basic need is for technique and taste in the production rather than energy and passion, and the former are the qualities that the Vic is best equipped to provide...
Playing at the number one position, Hamm defeated his old nemesis, Gary Tobin, who had whipped him earlier this year in a holiday tournament. Tim Gallwey withstood the smashes of Ephman Ed Fleischman to win in the second slot. Gerry Emmet, Pete Lund, Fred Vinton, Tony Lake, Wally Stimpson, Vic Poletti, and Kent Allen also registered victories...
Stephen Aaron's production of Hamlet two years ago proved (as if it needed proving) that it is possible, even pleasurable, to sit through four hours of solid Shakespeare. Yet the Old Vic Hamlet, which lasts a piffling three hours and twenty minutes, becomes for good stretches distinctly wearisome. Even the slow pace of Michael Benthall's direction is insufficient to account for the depth of its descent into tedium...
...well-spoken, and well-bred, Every word and action appears carfully premeditated and skillfully executed. When not a word of a play holds any surprises to many in the audience, its production may all too easily become a genteel ritual in propitiation of the gods of Culture. The Old Vic personnel do not fight against this tendency; they positively embrace it. Only at a few points is anything so unseemly as a spontaneous emotion allowed to mar the ceremonial calm. American productions of Shakespeare are likely to have abounding energy, but little technique or perfect taste. This Hamlet has exquisite...
...Another poet, William Shakespeare, was packing them in just as tightly. London's Old Vic, in its first New York appearance since 1956, performed to near capacity crowds every night (Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Henry V). The troupe expects to wind up its 25-week U.S. tour next month with total grosses of $1,200,000. And British Actor Sir John Gielgud, in a one-man tour de force (see THEATER), nearly filled the 1,300-seat 46th Street Theater nightly with recitations from Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, grossed $30,000 his first week...