Word: cowardly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Ernest Hemingway ordered doubles at Harry's Bar on hot Venetian mornings. Noel Coward savored them too. The Bellini, for 40 years a Harry's signature, is a romantic sort of drink -- fizzy on the tongue, dizzy on the mind and wonderfully pretty in pink. Now it has crossed the Atlantic triumphantly, as Cipriani has opened two dolce vita restaurants in New York...
...accused of committing atrocities against French Jews and Resistance fighters while he was head of the Gestapo in Lyons between 1942 and 1944. "You should remain and look into the eyes of the people you tortured!" cried a victim from the gallery. "But you refuse. You are a coward." Shouted a lawyer representing some plaintiffs: "Klaus Barbie is making a mockery of justice!" Said another: "I represent 6 million victims who cannot represent themselves...
...might be their normality, as if they were plump, middle-aged matrons nattering across a backyard fence about their ability to conjure spirits. That very perception of character seems to have guided Geraldine Page in a less malevolent but equally necromantic role, the ghost-summoning Madame Arcati in Noel Coward's larkish Blithe Spirit, which was revived on Broadway last week. The cast includes Richard Chamberlain, Blythe Danner and Judith Ivey, all in good form, but this is Page's show. In a career including eight Oscar nominations, culminating in a 1986 Best Actress award for The Trip to Bountiful...
...Blithe Spirit is a love triangle: smug, conventional Ruth Condomine (Ivey) is in love with her novelist husband Charles (Chamberlain); so is hoydenish Elvira (Danner), his late wife, whom Madame Arcati accidentally materializes; and all three of the Condomines are passionately in love with themselves. Most productions of Coward tend to be as glittery and brittle as spun glass. Murray brings the proceedings down to earth: these are not natural aristocrats but peasants with money and a veneer of polish, and when they mockingly meddle in the supernatural to gather color for one of Charles' books, they bring chaos crashing...
...making Charles, normally a beau ideal, just as petty as his wives, Murray helps diffuse the unattractive misogyny shot through virtually all of Coward's works. Still, this intelligent approach baffles some theatergoers and irritates others. It muffles many of the play's laughs and, more troublesome at the box office, keeps Chamberlain from maximizing his easy charm. Yet audiences who come to see him may depart delighted at having seen Page in full cry, sloshing her drinks onto people, cramming her mouth with sandwiches, then abruptly divining where her seance went wrong with a fierce delight that would surely...