Word: playwrights
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Highest Tree (by Dore Schary) is a disaster of good intentions. The author of Sunrise at Campobello is writing in protest: he is one of the people who, aware of the danger of strontium 90 in the air, would ban further nuclear test explosions. Playwright Schary's central figure, Dr. Aaron Cornish (Kenneth MacKenna) is a famous atomic scientist stricken, very possibly because of his nuclear activities, with acute leukemia. In any case, after self-searching, he determines to spend what months remain to him urging an end to nuclear-bomb tests...
...Hill to New York's City Hall at a breathless pace. Crowed the Philadelphia Inquirer: "The new champion!" ¶ A Loss of Roses has Shirley Booth as the listed star, but until the Booth part gets beefed up, the show belongs to Carol (Pajama Game) Haney. Latest of Playwright William Inge's lost characters, Haney's Lila Green is a high-spirited, Class-D showgirl who left home to search for the bright lights, but who has come back beaten, wanting "to crawl inside a man's shirt and stay there." Survivor of a disastrous marriage...
...Moon and Sixpence (NBC) presented Sir Laurence Olivier with a script that, despite faults, gave his immense talent full range. Somerset Maugham's biting novel of a man in the grip of artistic demons was formidable for transformation into less than 90 minutes of television drama. Before Playwright S. Lee (People Kill People Sometimes) Pogostin was called in, along with Director Bob Mulligan, two other scriptwriters had fumbled the job. After 48 hours packed with pencil work, pep pills and black coffee, Pogostin and Mulligan had built a play that pleased both Olivier and Producer David Susskind...
Ireland's tosspot Playwright-Autobiog-rapher Brendan Behan, a portly 36, tippy-toed back into London, whose citizens he treated last July to the spectacle of one of the most monumental binges of modern times. Proudly proclaimed Wife Beatrice, who did not accompany Behan on his summer pub safari: "He's been off the gargle for a week or two. He's been very good." In a Piccadilly bar, Behan hoisted just one wee nip and bellowed: "To success!" Clinking glasses with him, Beatrice responded: "Success to abstinence!" Then Behan lumbered off to the theater to catch...
...despite a whole arsenal of props and an agreeable assemblage of players, topped by TV's Tom Poston, Golden Fleecing is into the second act before it explodes into laughter. Then it expires in the third. Playwright Semple cannot solve the author's great problem of getting his people into trouble while staying out of it himself. He is too laborious tying his yarn in knots, too predictable untying it. Amid Director Abe Burrows' sharp whipcracking, there is too much forced wisecracking; amid a great many antics, there is never quite enough...