Hay Fever (Modern Classics)

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Set in a retirement home for actresses, Waiting in the Wings focuses on a feud between residents Lotta Bainbridge and May Davenport, who once both loved the same man.

During the 1950s and 1960s Coward continued to write musicals and plays. After the Ball, his 1953 adaptation of Lady Windermere's Fan, was the last musical he premiered in the West End; his last two musicals were first produced on Broadway. Sail Away (1961), set on a luxury cruise liner, was Coward's most successful post-war musical, with productions in America, Britain and Australia. [96] The Girl Who Came to Supper, a musical adaptation of The Sleeping Prince (1963), ran for only three months. [97] He directed the successful 1964 Broadway musical adaptation of Blithe Spirit, called High Spirits. Coward's late plays include a farce, Look After Lulu! (1959), and a tragi-comic study of old age, Waiting in the Wings (1960), both of which were successful despite "critical disdain". [98] Coward argued that the primary purpose of a play was to entertain, and he made no attempt at modernism, which he felt was boring to the audience although fascinating to the critics. His comic novel, Pomp and Circumstance (1960), about life in a tropical British colony, met with more critical success. [99] [n 8] Bausch & Lomb Optical Company / Danny Kaye / Kemp Niver / Greta Garbo / Jon Whiteley / Vincent Winter / Gate of Hell (1954)Just a note: Laurette Taylor, by the way, wasn’t entirely happy about being a known model family for Hay Fever. She protested that none of them had been that rude. Glad Coward’s lot was, though. Irresistible, awful, immortal. The Master may have hidden always behind a mask, but he was also hiding in plain sight – continually using his plays to remind audiences of the roles he played, the masks he wore. Consider this line from Leo, another character close to a self-portrait, in Design for Living: "It's all a question of masks, really… we all wear them as a form of protection; modern life forces us to." Fifty years since his death, we still enjoy Coward's wit and humour – but are maybe still uncovering the sadness that lies beneath. Leonard Bernstein / Carol Burnett / Rex Harrison / The National Theatre Company of Great Britain / The Negro Ensemble Company (1969)

Billington, Michael (27 August 2014). " Hay Fever review – hysteria rules as Felicity Kendal does Coward". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 18 October 2023. Noël Coward’s effervescent comedy of bad manners – written in three days when he was 24 – is set in a country house in Berkshire.By the end of the 1960s, Coward developed arteriosclerosis and, during the run of Suite in Three Keys, he struggled with bouts of memory loss. [113] This also affected his work in The Italian Job, and he retired from acting immediately afterwards. [114] Coward was knighted in 1970, [115] and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. [116] He received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement in 1970. [117] In 1972, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by the University of Sussex. [118] Cheryl Crawford / Equity Liberty Theatre / Barry Manilow / National Theatre of the Deaf / Diana Ross / Lily Tomlin (1977) The theatre must be treated with respect. It is a house of strange enchantment, a temple of dreams. What it most emphatically is not and never will be is a scruffy, ill-lit drill hall serving as a temporary soap-box for political propaganda. [146] In a study of Coward's plays, published in 1982, John Lahr called Hay Fever "the first and the finest of his major plays". [65] In 2014 Michael Billington wrote of a new production: "I found myself wondering why, 90 years after it was written, Noël Coward's comedy still proves so astonishingly durable. I suspect it is because it combines astute observation with ironclad technique". [66] Adaptations [ edit ] a b c d e f "Appendix 3 (The Relative Popularity of Coward's Works)", Noël Coward Music Index, accessed 29 November 2015

Other Coward works produced in the mid-to-late 1920s included the plays Easy Virtue (1926), a drama about a divorcée's clash with her snobbish in-laws; The Queen Was in the Parlour, a Ruritanian romance; This Was a Man (1926), a comedy about adulterous aristocrats; The Marquise (1927), an eighteenth-century costume drama; Home Chat (1927), a comedy about a married woman's fidelity; and the revues On with the Dance (1925) and This Year of Grace (1928). None of these shows has entered the regular repertoire, but the last introduced one of Coward's best-known songs, "A Room with a View". [54] His biggest failure in this period was the play Sirocco (1927), which concerns free love among the wealthy. It starred Ivor Novello, of whom Coward said, "the two most beautiful things in the world are Ivor's profile and my mind". [55] Theatregoers hated the play, showing violent disapproval at the curtain calls and spitting at Coward as he left the theatre. [56] Coward later said of this flop, "My first instinct was to leave England immediately, but this seemed too craven a move, and also too gratifying to my enemies, whose numbers had by then swollen in our minds to practically the entire population of the British Isles." [57] Between 1929 and 1936 Coward recorded many of his best-known songs for His Master's Voice (HMV), now reissued on CD, including the romantic " I'll See You Again" from Bitter Sweet, the comic " Mad Dogs and Englishmen" from Words and Music, and "Mrs Worthington". [69] Second World War [ edit ] All that does mean that even though you are the most successful person in the world, you never rest easy," posits Thompson. "I think he felt like an outsider more or less his whole life." Coward won new popularity in several notable films later in his career, such as Around the World in 80 Days (1956), Our Man in Havana (1959), Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965), Boom! (1968) and The Italian Job (1969). [105] Stage and film opportunities he turned down in the 1950s included an invitation to compose a musical version of Pygmalion (two years before My Fair Lady was written), and offers of the roles of the king in the original stage production of The King and I, and Colonel Nicholson in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai. [106] Invited to play the title role in the 1962 film Dr. No, he replied, "No, no, no, a thousand times, no." [107] In the same year, he turned down the role of Humbert Humbert in Lolita, saying, "At my time of life the film story would be logical if the 12-year-old heroine was a sweet little old lady." [108]

THE MILL AT SONNING PRIVACY POLICY

The play covers a 20-year period from June 1919, when the Gibbons family move into their new home near London's Clapham Common, to when they move out in June 1939. A 1985 production at the Music Box Theatre in New York had a cast including Mia Dillon as Sorel, Robert Joy as Simon, Barbara Bryne as Clara, Rosemary Harris as Judith, Roy Dotrice as David, Campbell Scott as Sandy, Carolyn Seymour as Myra, Charles Kimbrough as Richard, and Deborah Rush. [46] Other [ edit ] Even Cole Lesley's 1976 biography refers to Coward as "Noel": "...I have also forgone the use of his beloved diaeresis over the 'e' in his name, having no wish to dizzy the eye of the reader." [151] a b Byrne, Ciar. "What's inspiring the Noël Coward renaissance?" The Independent, 21 January 2008, accessed on 17 March 2009 Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward, The National Theatre, June 1976 (and tour)" at haroldpinter.org, 2003, accessed 7 March 2009