Word: witnessed
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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With biting satire and rollicking wit, the play portrays a medical charlatan who parlays a non-existent practice in a rural French village into a hospital (formerly the town's hotel) brimming with the hypochondriactic citizenry...
...what evidently escaped the Tufts' players. The cast was unfortunately headed by Fred Blais, who, miscast as Knock, turned in a dismal performance. While maintaining the Doctor's mock-solemnity, he not only failed to imbue him with the necessary dynamism and authority, but utterly lacked Knock's resourcefulness, wit, and ability to manipulate people. His awkward use of medical instruments, moreover, was not calculated to convince the audience that he was more than a bungler, which Knock most emphatically...
Monday evening's opening was marred by none of the foibles which often make the play long, tedious and choked with Shavian didacticism. The production moved quickly from the peaks of Shavian wit and left the sprawling valleys of Shaw's philosophizing to shift for themselves...
...Ballet; Angel). Menotti's bittersweet madrigal fable of a lonely poet's struggle with "the indifferent killers of the Poet's dreams" seems almost as effective in recording as it did on the stage (TIME, Nov. 5). The libretto, in clearest English, is thorny with barbed wit, and the music is alternately exuberant and shadowed with the gentle melancholy the poet-hero feels as he slowly dies, surrounded by "the pain-wrought children of my fancy...
Director Preminger seems to approach Shaw's classic with a heavy Germanic reverence that sorts ill with the trustbusting, wit-snapping Shavian spirit. His scriptwriter, Novelist Graham Greene, has adapted Shaw's play to the screen almost word for word. The result is talk, talk, talk. And even when the talk is good Shawmanship, Preminger and his cast manage to make it bad acting. Indeed, the whole company plays with such clumsiness that the expert Sir John Gielgud, as Warwick, has to pick his way to histrionic success like a first-string halfback dodging through the scrub...