Word: wildering
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Russia, and the reality of the rat-race which it is. In so far as he thought, by wild flatteries and wilder lies, to knock in a wedge of misunderstanding between India and the West, his attempt has been a failure; and all that he has done in Burma has been to embarrass his hosts to the point of stupefaction. Mr. Khrushchev had better watch out when he gets back to Moscow, for he has spun enough rope on this excursion to hang a dozen men of his girth...
Margaret sounded fine last week as she chatted with Playwright Thornton Wilder ("I adore Thornton Wilder") and Pianist Liberace ("extremely gracious"). The week before, when the show got off to a fast start, she had sounded just as good chatting by phone with Jimmy Durante. Margaret: "Thanks for calling, Jimmy. You're the most." Jimmy: "It's the least...
...tantrum. Sinclair Lewis, one of his early targets, called him "a tedious and egotistical fool . . . a pompous and boresome liar." "What," asked Critic Edmund Wilson, "is Mr. DeVoto's real grievance . . . this continual boiling up about other people's wild statements which stimulates him to even wilder statements...
...fact, produced a wonderfully funny comedy by combining two very different comic techniques. He has gone back several centuries for gimmicks like people hidden in closets, boys dressed as girls, chairs pulled out from under their prospective occupants, burlesque dialect and gestures, and even bad jokes. But Wilder has not forgotten the innovating spirit of his Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth days, either. Every main character in The Matchmaker has at least one outright soliloquy in which he steps up to the footlights and blatantly tells the audience his thoughts and motivations, and at the end each...
...slapstick is a theatrical narcotic, and both Wilder and director Tyrone Guthric almost inhale too much of the stuff. Having written the play expressly for Ruth Gordon in the role of Mrs. Levi, the author has given her too many lines that depend on dialect alone. Guthrie has compounded the peccadillo by letting Miss Gordon maintain her rasping voice too loud for too much of the time. The result, especially when Loring Smith is sharing the scene as the booming and gesticulating Vandergelder, is a shouting match that numbs the audience and detracts from those scenes wherein pandemonium reigns legitimately...