Word: witting
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...lovely, wide-eyed female spy who is the only really bright thing in the play. She is arrogant and clever, scheming and talkative, and of course beats Napoleon. Paula Cronbach wanders into this femme fatale role with a beguiling innocence that can suddenly turn into astonishing alertness and wit. As Napoleon, Edward McKirdy succeeds, but not so smoothly. He seems to realize that Shaw's portrait of the general as a young man is weak, and that Shaw's Napoleon talks so much and acts so little that the man of destiny would probably have remained a corporal. McKirdy...
...into what he called "depressions, black as a smith's beard." Praised by his friends for his courage and devotion, he only answered tersely: "I stink in the midst of respect." Only Mary's misfortunes could lessen the pain of his own -which is why a wit named them "Gum Boil and Toothache," each being "a great relief" to the other...
...play probably has enough serviceable tricks, enough scattered brilliance, enough second-bounce for a superlative production to bring the whole thing off. The current production is no more than a very competent one; it cannot convey a needed sense of grand-staircased crescendoes and crystal-chandeliered wit. As Magnus, Maurice Evans has his real virtues, and the right polished utterance, but for parry-and-thrust he uses a gold-headed cane instead of a rapier, and he seems in manner more tutorial than ironic...
...make a tepid conference more tepid, and had lost his place in the leadership stakes to the debonair Macmillan. Now he bounced back with the kind of clear, practical talk that shaped the "New Toryism" with which the party won its way back to power in 1950. With wit and humor, Rab Butler apprised the party of the ever-changing path to office: "In the Middle Ages you bullied your way to power. In the classical age you bribed your way to power. And for the major portion of the 19th century, as readers of Pickwick Papers will recall...
...strikingly natty showcase: Dolores Gray belted out I Get a Kick Out of You and Just One of Those Things. George Sanders suavely suggested that he was singing C'est Magnifique. Peter Lind Hayes and Mary Healy provided the comic element, with some mild stabs of wit. Bing Crosby merely contributed a tune clipped from High Society (Now You Has Jazz), sung with Louis ("Satch-mo") Armstrong, whose galvanic Blow, Gabriel, Blow undoubtedly jazzed up CBS's ratings. Best numbers: You Do Something to Me, ravishingly sung by Dorothy Dandridge: Sanders and bosomy Dolores Gray seductively sighing...