Word: witness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This applies even when (especially when) one production is sublime and the other soso. Much Ado thrills the senses with its fairy-tale weave of love, honor and wit. Cyrano is a lesser play and a lesser production, a theatrical war horse that keeps buckling at the knees. Yet Cyrano is a more typical Royal Shakespeare evening. The capacious stage of the Gershwin Theater teems with actors and activity; Ralph Koltai's set is brownish, broody, tattered just so; the tone of the crowd scenes is strenuously raunchy; during the battle scene, cannon fire pops your eardrums...
...house lights dim, wind chimes fill the night, and a lady appears at her cello to play a wistful air. Welcome to empyrean, where wit is a state of grace and the seraphim move in minute, minuet steps. No mortals need apply here, in this latest Royal Shakespeare Company triumph, which opened last week at Broadway's Gershwin Theater in repertory with Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. In the Much Ado realm, gods and goddesses play at love, duel with words, feign indifference and even death to gauge a suitor's passion-all to wile away...
...Louisville, he at last proved himself a champion of one debate. And again images were decisive. He won handily, but he wasn't so brilliant. He spoke clearly, confidently, with some wit--hardly, it seems, too much to expect from a man who would be President. But pre-debate pieces on each evening newscast prepared audiences for a struggling Mondale, and a television-wise president. Instead, the President came across not too wise in television and not too wise in much else, for that matter, and so Mondale was declared the victor. Democrats finally had something to cheer about...
Women who sought a livelihood could be shopkeepers, petticoat authors, peddlers or midwives. Perhaps the career with the greatest risk and the greatest social mobility was that of a courtesan. Fraser's wit any style are at their best in this passage...
Fraser goes on to recount anecdotes from the lives of famous misses or mistresses, like Catherine Sedley, who as James II's mistress had a "long nose" and was "too thin" but had "wit...