Word: overacting
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...winners (winnowed from 1,000 applicants) were hampered by shaky Italian diction and an occasional tendency to overact from sheer youthful exuberance (Painter Marcello, in Act I, hurled his brush clear offstage into the orchestra pit). But audience and critics were impressed by the Americans' voices and technique. The best voice in the group, many thought, belonged to Tacoma (Wash.) Baritone Roald Reitan, who sang briefly last year with the San Francisco Opera. Ohio-born Tenor Jean Deis, who was told when he was nine that scarlet fever would prevent him from ever speaking again, also got a generous...
...person in the play, seem intentionally pale and undefined. Eliot champions a stylized drama in which the playwright, not the actor or director, is responsible for every nuance and subtlety of meaning. Particularly in "Murder in the Cathedral," there is little room for individual interpretation. A slight tendency to overact can damage the effect produced by the play. For this reason, the part of Becket, the only major role, is unique. The impressive, moving lines go not to the principal but to the chorus. Yet the actor in the lead must convey all the agony and beauty that comes with...
Unfortunately, the supporting cast is not equal to Slezak's level of acting. Replacing the original New York company, his companions betray a lack of familiarity with the lines, and worse, a tendency to overact. Admittedly most of the parts are caricatures, yet they do not deserve the heavy treatment of Paul Lipson's Henri Trochard, or the tiring gushiness of Delores Mann, the immature Ducotel daughter. Slezak's fellow convicts, played by Royal Beal and Carl Betz, seem brighter and more natural...
...much for Maugham. The production, with Katherine Cornell in the lead, is excellent I would say. Miss Cornell has a tendency to overact, but this is perhaps a good thing in a play like The Constant Wife. Certainly I wouldn't press the objection. The rest of the cast is good, too, and the production as a whole is well modulated...
Both Miss McGuire and her busty co-star overact. The former is cast as the daughter of a Long Island millionaire, a soft mouthed old gent portrayed by Louis Calhern with die-cut precision. Miss McGuire suffers from an incurable heart ailment, a part for which she is physically fitted. Her expression is one of such pain, however, that she might have been better cast as a girl correspondent shipwrecked in a leper colony...