Word: wittedly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...horse & buggy creaked along, the driver turned to the man in the odd little cape and asked: "You a traveling salesman?" The stranger nodded agreeably, but said nothing. The driver tried again: "What do you sell?" This time his passenger smiled. "Wit and wisdom" he said. After a shocked silence, the driver protested: "I've never seen a traveling salesman yet who wouldn't show me his wares...
Topaze (adapted from the French of Marcel Pagnol by Benn W. Levy; produced by Yolanda Mero-Irion & the New Opera Company) triumphed on Broadway just 18 years ago. Returning last week, it looked like a genuine theatrical relic. It still had traces of gay cynicism, Gallic sprightliness and wit. But it wheezed, wobbled, and seemed all the sadder for trying to look jaunty...
...surrealist-Freudian flavor. The surreal touch is applied to several scenes with absolute poetic Tightness: by retarding to slow motion Beauty's terror-struck sprint through the Beast's castle, Cocteau conveys every decibel of the shriek she cannot release. There is also plenty of surreal wit: the Beast's eyes, ears, nose and fingernails fume when the fires of lust blaze up in him; and Beauty's tears turn to diamonds on her cheeks...
...Worshipful Critic Eric Bentley, who has tried to truss Shavian doctrine into a system of thought, is one of the few who still pay unflagging homage to Shaw's ideas. For him Shaw is not merely a brilliant playwright who handled the English language with a clarity and wit unrivaled since Swift; Shaw is also a profound thinker whose "pose of arrogance was a deliberate strategy in an utterly altruistic struggle" to irritate men into thought. But the "utterly altruistic struggle" failed, and there was Shaw's tragedy: he, the court jester, was idolized, his plays were adored...
...there is little sprawl and no congestion, and things turn dull only where Shakespeare himself has let history nose out drama. Moreover, under Guthrie McClintic's perceptive direction, this Antony and Cleopatra properly brims over with worldliness, cynical wit, self-seeking and double-dealing...