Word: whiffen
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Trelawny of the Wells. Producer George C. Tyler said, "Where would the world be if it weren't for sentiment?"; and answered his own question by reviving Sir Arthur Wing Pinero's play with the the stage-folk of yesterday: John Drew, Mrs. Whiffen, Otto Kruger, Effie Shannon, Henrietta Crosman, Wilton Lackaye, O. P. Heggie. He tossed in a few of the younger luminaries, too: Pauline Lord...
Helen Gahagan, Hollo Peters, Eric Dressier, Mrs. Whiffen's matronly daughter, Peggy. This, the highest paid assemblage ever seen on one legitimate stage, enacts for the fourth time in the U. S. (the first, 1898) the fortunes of those shockingly Bohemian actors and actresses who strutted in famed Sadler's "Wells" during the reign of good Queen Victoria. To the zip-gobbling audiences of this day, the play offers mellow humor and pathos-qualities whose commercial values are doubtful. To the student of the theatre, to the lover of stage personalities, it is irresistable. Dramatist Pinero in Trelawny...
...Trelawny the downfall of the old timers is the essential motif. But in the revival the audience showed that it had not forgotten its old favorites. John Drew (Vice Chancellor), now 73, was cheered mightily when he first looked from behind his newspaper in the second act. Mrs. Whiffen, 83, a nice old lady, was greeted with prolonged applause. The world still loves its illusions...
...Frederick Donaghey, critic of the Chicago Tribune, wrote: 'A guess as to the other nine, in view of Miss Miller's special talents for the part, would list the Misses Sophie Tucker, Marie Dressier, Fannie Brice, Nora Bayes, Gilda Grey, Henrietta Grossman, Nazimova, Mrs. Thomas Whiffen and the two-a-day gymnast called Dainty Marie.' Said Alexander Woollcott, famed critic of The New York Herald: 'Quite the unkindest paragraph of the year is credited to Frederick Donaghey...
...capable cast headed by Norman Trevor and Mrs. Thomas Whiffen demonstrates the author's thesis with keen conviction. Yet probably the most valuable feature of the proceedings is the author's observant photography of the vast sum of little things that go to make up life in an upper middle class family of the Middle West...