Word: pagliacci
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Herrmann's thesis is a stubborn one, and her subject must play Pagliacci to the end. Editors and women friends are brought on to recall a "contained," "testy, easily depressed man," "cranky to be considered this 'national treasure' and not sell." Herrmann adds that after the failure of his last play, The Beauty Part, in 1963, "(Perelman) began to lose the comic writer's most precious gift -- a sense of humor." This will come as a great surprise to readers who enjoyed Perelmania in five later collections of essays as well as a number of saline interviews and commentaries...
...even in disappointed love, Shaw could never quite play the tragedian; the best he could manage was Pagliacci. These are the years of Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the original Liza. Shaw was lured to her drawing room, Laurence notes, "at which time, by Mrs. Campbell's subtle contrivance, her bosom and his fingertips came into fleeting contact." Shaw is instantly smitten; he confesses to a friend, "I am on the verge of 56. There has never been anything so ridiculous, or so delightful, in the history of the world...
...president of a textile firm. He owned a box in the grand tier, the so-called Diamond Horseshoe, of the old Metropolitan Opera House, and he was chairman of the board from 1938 to 1946. Anthony attended his first performance when he was six, hearing Enrico Caruso in I Pagliacci, and when his father died in 1949, he was automatically offered a seat on the governing board. "I was aware of the kind of problems that faced opera for as long as I could remember," he says, "and I suppose that I got my knowledge of opera by osmosis...
...concocted a nice bickering relationship between Falk and his Dolls (Vicki Frederick and Laurene Landon), who are attractive, talented and without doubt the bravest young actresses in the business. As for Falk, his character has managed to identify himself, in his own mind anyway, with another traveling entertainer, Pagliacci. That, however, does not prevent him from wielding a baseball bat effectively when he has to defend himself and gruff words fail...
...parents: "I am afraid that this will be a blow to you but I assure you not nearly as severe a blow as it is to me." The thorny carapace that later became so famous grew out of his suffering: "I was getting into a sort of Charlie Chaplinish Pagliacci attitude to myself as the man with a tragedy in his life and a tender smile for children. So all that must stop." And in 1930 he converted to Roman Catholicism...