Word: wits
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee. Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle award as the best play of the year, Virginia Woolf detonates a shattering three-act marital explosion that, for savage wit and skill, is unparalleled in the recent annals of the U.S. stage. As the embattled couple, Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen enact their roles with magnificent ferocity...
...than a musical exercise was Richard Wilson's Suite for Five Players (In Five Sections). While apparently making due obeisances to the contemporary requirement of a priori organization (the sequence of timbres and textures appeared well organized, i.e., sufficiently chaotic), Wilson actually indulged in the old-fashioned technique of wit. Conducting a very competent chamber ensemble (flute, clarinet, viola, cello, percussion), Wilson produced an observable change of tempo within the very first of the five sections: an event totally unexpected in view of the leaden, unchanging tempi of the preceding work on the program. In the succeeding movements, Wilson created...
...private mail and reads that too." Like a Love Affair. His wit was as well known as his eccentricity. Once when talking to a pretty girl pilot he explained a tail spin as "something like a love affair; you don't notice how you get into it, and it is very hard to get out of." He liked to quote the definition of a Hungarian as "a man who goes into a revolving door behind you and comes out ahead." When asked why so many top scientists are Hungarian, he explained: "We are all from Mars originally. We decided...
...Douglas Campbell has made a stylized harlequinade of Molière's comedy of avarice, with curtsying dances and puckish pratfalls, Halloween masks and wopsical hats. It is more a costume ball than a play, and it stresses what is sheen-deep in Molière's wit rather than what is skinflinty. Still, in a glancing way, the master French comic moralist's point does get made-that a sin is called deadly because it deadens. Mock-Hero Harpagon (Hume Cronyn) is dead to his children's hope of love, dead to his servants...
Robbins has shown no sense of the play's heroic proportions. He has turned Mother Courage into a wit; her retorts, her quips, the timing of her speech is better suited to Shaw or Wilde than to Brecht. Her power becomes verbal; its physical and emotional aspects fade. Minor characters, too were misdirected or badly cast. Ignoring Brecht's colorful human vignettes, Robbins simply instructed the peripheral figures to recite their lines (and they didn't even do that accurately...