Word: wits
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...brilliantly dressy slapstick satire: a show most wise and cruel when it seemed most raucous and extravagant. As a screenplay-written by Wolf Mankowitz and directed by John Guillermin-Anouilh's fine-feathered strutter has been saponified, caponified, shorn of its more splendid plumes of wit and stuffed with a mighty chunk of supererogatory and rashly overcolored celluloid that might have been more sensibly and even profitably employed to blow up the bank that financed this picture...
...tickets to most attractions are enticingly easy to get. Top dramatic playbilling goes to The Night of the Iguana and A Man for All Seasons. Iguana is Tennessee Williams' gentlest play since The Glass Menagerie, and the wisest play he has ever written. Seasons is a play of wit and probity about a man of wit and probity, Sir Thomas More. On the comedy front, A Thousand Clowns lives up to its title, and rings merry changes on the slightly tired subject of nonconformity. In its second season, Jean Kerr's Mary, Mary remains a wisecrackling funfest...
...clutch of musicals caters to the best and worst of tastes. The astringent wit of Abe Burrows fuses How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and the impish energies of Robert Morse provide the explosive for an evening of great delight. Multi-aptituded Zero Mostel brings his masterly clowning to A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, an uproarious burlesquerie, lewdly adapted from some plays of Plautus. And there is still plenty of verve and joy left in the grande dame of Broadway musicals, My Fair Lady...
Much of the success of the North Shore production may be attributed to its star Rosalind Elias. Unlike many another musical comedy actress, Miss Elias does not exaggerate the potential of her role. She attempts no feigned gaity to intimidate the audience, no sophisticated wit, no theatrical high notes. Rather, she plays the part as it is written: as an intense and sentimental romantic, with little but the intensity of her emotion to commend her to her audience. But the romanticism of the part as it is portrayed by Miss Elias secures its effect. The luscious music comes through powerfully...
...make less than a ripple on theatrical tides with endless variations on the inevitable flagrant delit, or with revues and vaudevilles based on evanescent issues of the moment: the Franco-Russian Alliance, X-rays, the Parisian Metro, and the like. Others however, were constructed by comic dramatists of genuine wit and ability, humorists like Georges Feydeau, Tristan Bernard and Georges Courteline. If such authors may never be credited with bringing about any major revolutions in the French (or World) theatre, they were, all the same, uncontested experts in the no less noble endeavor of showing their contemporaries the laughable side...