Word: brustein
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...Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, by Lorraine Hansberry, has too many minds of its own. It is overloaded, overwritten and overwrought. It is about guilt and guilt collectors, venting their oral-compulsive laments in a Greenwich Village setting. Through the play troop the Quixotes who venture into political quicksands, the soiled hipsters of success and the purist false priests of failure, self-deceiving bohemians, homosexuals, husbands, wives, artists and whores. Everything overlaps and the play has diversity without direction. It endlessly circles its own conversation...
...lunatic asylum. Peter Brook directs the "black comedy," which stars Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, Martyn Green, Robert Shaw and George Voscovec. The Diamond Orchid spans the last 37 months in the life of an Eva Perón. Lorraine Hansberry's The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, her first play since Raisin in the Sun, is about a Greenwich Village newspaper publisher, played by Mort Sahl in his first straight Broadway role...
...supporting cast includes a number of actors who deserve commendation, notably Michael Lewis as the irascible Roebuck Ramsden and Sorrell Booke as the arch-brigand Mendoza (also the Devil in the Don Juan scene). Cavada Humphrey turned in an adequate performance as the misunderstood Violet Robinson, as did Robert Brustein and Thomas Hill as her husband and father-in-law respectively. I particularly enjoyed John Wynne-Evans as Straker, Tanner's Cockney chauffeur...
...this reason, and also because the work is relatively short, director Elliot Silverstein decided to fatten the work up to a total running time of two and a quarter hours. He had Robert Brustein compose and, in the persona of Moliere, deliver a prologue and epilogue; the prologue was appropriate enough, but the epilogue was ineffectual and ill-advisd. He furthermore incorporated, by changing the sex or name of some of the characters, scenes from Les fourberies de Scapin, which Moliere penned right after finishing the present work--specifically, the portions dealing with the extortion of ransom money...
Outstanding are Reuben Singer as the nobleman Dorante, Sorrell Booke as the Music Master, Robert Brustein as the Dancing Master and Michael Lewis as the Philosopher. As the Fencing Master, Thomas Hill should speak with more elegance. Evelyn Ward is attractive as the maidservant Nicole, but seems a little too cultured; and Gail Garnett, as Jourdain's daughter Lucille, is not cultured enough and speaks too softly--maybe these two should have swapped roles. Dee Victor, as Jourdain's shrewd and shrewish wife, needs a great deal more force...