Word: hippolyta
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...even by amateurs for 20 years. He promptly put the Bard and his students in the same corral. Instead of "a wood near Athens," Reeve's Dream is set on a Texas ranch in the 1880s, and the guitar-twanging players appear in Stetsons, bandannas and bustles (Hippolyta is an Indian princess in white buckskin). The dialogue is unchanged except by Texas tongues: "O naht! alack, alack, alack! Ah feah mah Thisby's promise is furgot...
Merely pleasant too are most of the cast-pretty, thin-voiced Cinemactress Constance Moore, big-limbed Benay Venuta, gallery-god Ronald Graham. It's Ray Bolger's show. As husky Hippolyta's simpering, ladylike husband he is deft enough to draw many a laugh, skirt many a snicker. As a dancer he is superb-inexhaustibly inventive, unfailingly comic. But being the star of the show he has to carry too much on his shoulders to do all that he might with his feet...
...this case the boys really had something to build on. The plot is based on "The Warrior's Husband," a farce by Julian S. Thompson, acted on Broadway some ten years back by Katherine Hepburn. The time is the B. C.'s; Hippolyta is Queen of the Amazons, that tribe of women warriors who thought that man's place was in the home. She marries shy, sissified Sapiens, son of Pomposia, who has a corner on the spear and arrow market, in order to get the necessary armaments to ward off an attacking Greek army. As long as Hippolyta wears...
...Bolger, with his unsurpassed clowning and comedy dancing, sets the pace for the show, as the original pansy, Sapiens. Take his rendition of a naughty balled entitled "Life With Father," for instance, or his slapstick technique with Benay Venuta, the properly Amazonian Hippolyta, in "Ev'rything I've Got Belongs To You." Constance Moore, recruited from the flickers, is a pretty dish as the strong and tasty Antiope. She doesn't know what to do with her hands yet, but her songs are well delivered and she has a nice comic sense...
...extremely unfortunate that this picture at the University Theatre presents such a one-sided view of Amazons; such a terribly glittering twentieth-century burlesque of an old fable which had its really tender and artistic sides. Modern society views the overwhelming dominance of women in this story of Hippolyta and her court, or in the play of Lysistrata, as unnatural to the point of ridiculousness, and so in the "Warrior's Husband" we have a ridiculous farce, bubbling with mirth and Broadway wit, but none the less, reminiscent of an Elk's pageant in a small town...