Word: wayes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...seemed to Reginald Kell that "there must be some easier way out than engineering." So he took up the clarinet. After one day, because he had once studied violin, he could play a couple of tunes. In ten years, he was a professor of clarinet in the Royal Academy of Music, which later made him a Fellow, "a fate I thought reserved only for respectable musicians, like an organist at St. Paul...
...Make Way for Lucia (by John van Druten, based on E. F. Benson's novels; produced by the Theatre Guild) tells of a showoff English widow (Isabel Jeans) who settles down for the summer of 1912 in a buzzing English village. Christened Emmeline but always called Lu-chee-a, she also affects gaily soulful garments, ostentatiously moves from the easel to the pianoforte, dabbles in Italian, and occasionally drops into baby talk...
...double exposure of the precious and the provincial, a caricature of manners and a comedy of airs, Make Way for Lucia is as full of gentility and small jabs as an old-fashioned pin cushion. Some of it is pleasant fun; virtually all of it gains from Mr. van Druten's deft and mannerly use of E. F. Benson's yellowing Lucia novels, and from the amusing exaggerations of a capable cast. What cuts down on the fun in Lucia is the too-great sameness of the cutting-up. The fun itself tends to be pretty thin...
...Southern France during the summer of 1944, The Victors treats of a few captured members of the Resistance and of their Vichyite captors. For about half the way, it is a chronicle of torture: the desperate bravery of the Maquis in refusing to talk, the fiendish brutality of the Vichyites in trying to make them. The prisoners, afraid that a youngster among them will sooner or later be tormented into blabbing, strangle...
There is no lack of either a mind or a theater mind in The Victors-it is as charged with ideas as with harsh melodrama. The fault, in fact, lies just that way-in a too-muchness of everything that becomes a form of melodrama in itself. In piling up too many motives, in piling on too much horror, the play loses its impact. The characters get to be much less human beings than mere Existencils; the ideas lack value because Sartre insists on using them as bombs rather than light bulbs. For all its intellectualism, The Victors...