Word: playing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1970
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Army squads usually feature a hard hitting, aggressive style of play. The Cadets will probably try to use their power and physical conditioning as an advantage...
...ACTORS have come hither, dear reader, and-as Polonius would have it-they're set on being the best actors in the world. Either for tragedy, comedy, historical, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral. And all within the scope of one play, mind you. The play in question being Peter Raby's adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers. And given that Raby renders the venerable old Dumas novel in a succession of Forty, Count em, Forty, Swiftly Moving and Breathtakingly Dramatic Scenes-See D'Artagnan outwit the Cardinal's guards! See Milady de Winter steal...
...were to retile the thing Sword's Play, however, you could just about sum up the evening's essential appeal. Sooner or later some learned anthropologist is bound to discover that sword play-whether it be little kids thrashing it out with crossed sticks or European masters fencing for a winning point-is a primitive kind of drama. What with its ritual, conflict, spectacle, and resolution, how could it be anything else? The Three Musketeers is full of such clashes of steel, and William Taylor appears to have done a fine job in teaching a couple of dozen...
...think such juvenile delights are all this play has to offer; it's also got its outright adolescent side. Hamlin directs the love affair between the French Queen Anne (Innes-Fergus McDade) and the British Duke of Buckingham (Robert McCleary)-"one of those streaks of fate that change the course of history" we are told-with a delicate seriousness that makes it all the more wonderfully ludicrous. Anne protests that she can't possibly love the Duke because they have "only had 3 meetings in the last 4 years," but minutes later ends up forking over to him jewels given...
...waiting has written to D'Artagnan, "I have been abducted again," and, with that, the plot's whole creaky machinery is set in motion. Timothy Carden is D'Artagnan, the would-be fourth musketeer; to him falls the task of combining many of the disparate elements of the play. As the busiest actor on stage, Carden is called upon to handle battles, brawls, and bedroom scenes and does so winningly with his usual blend of physical energy and ingenuous geniality. He provides the driving force that sets the other three musketeers-Michael Smith as the clothes-conscious Porthos, George Sheanshang...