Word: soliloquy
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Back on Gallup. For the remaining months of his life, he grubs for the answers in the memory heap of five decades, and talks his flashback findings into a tape recorder. As Jeff's soliloquy unreels on the pages of Author Carl Jonas' novel (a February Book-of-the-Month Club choice), it unwraps not a man but a mummy. For Jeff Selleck has not sprung from the soil of the creative imagination; he has been raised from the dust of the literary graveyard. He is a latter-day George Babbitt a westernized George Apley, a bewildered Willy...
...roles as washed-out old men. But John Beal, the imported leading man, lacked inspiration. The part of Ivanov requires a certain intensity which must reveal itself immediately and grow with the development of Ivanov's character. Beal reached the proper emotional level only in his long third act soliloquy. For the remainder of the performance, he vacillated between over and underplaying and failed to give unity to his characterization. However, considering the weaknesses of the play, director Henry Weinstein made the most of the difficult characterizations and situations...
...third act, in which Captain Vere (Tenor Peter Pears) walks to Billy's door, accompanied by long-measured chords, to deliver the death verdict. When the curtain fell for the act, there were seconds of silence, and then shouts of "Bravo, Benjy." Billy's fourth-act soliloquy, poetically sung by U.S. Baritone Theodor Uppman, and Captain Vere's epilogue, capped the climax...
...pseudo-Proust is, all inadvertently, the funniest of Author Calisher's impersonations. In Point of Departure, a double soliloquy conducted by the two members of a love affair, the interminable sentences curl so concentrically and wearily that they come to sound like a playback on a run-down phonograph. The Bowenism is a sight more readable. Letitia, Emeritus, the story of a "backward" girl whose seduction by a prurient old teacher topples a domino-row of calamities, is managed with the firm Bowen wrist and the sure fingering of details. Yet, somehow, though Author Calisher has fingered her characters...
Webb, remembered as the father in "The Winslow Boy," is a surefire comedian. At first the indignant husband, he is soon impressed by the glamorous life of Niven, and in a show-stopping soliloquy, makes the third act by extolling the duties of the carefree bachelor. He is magnificent...