A few from John Simon:
"As Viola, Helen Hunt is as bad as it gets. She wears a permanently befuddled expression, scrunches up her eyes as though under a barrage of grapefruits, and always leads with her head as if to butt her lines into an enemy goal. Her delivery is a tuneless singsong, and whereas some Violas have trouble passing for a boy, this one has problems reminding us she's a woman. No less ludicrous is the Olivia of Kyra Sedgwick, though here the heavy directorial hand is more guiltily evident. She behaves largely like a sideshow freak, with double-jointed contortions, unhinged crouches and leaps, grimaces unlimited, and fishwifely squeals and yelps -- and this, mind you, from a supposedly frosty, aristocratic beauty in unthawable mourning. In a production in which unlikely and painfully protracted smoochings proliferate, her near-rape of Sebastian takes the cake -- if not the ale as well."
"There are several things wrong here, but the worst -- contrary to what you may have read elsewhere -- was the casting of Faith Prince as the solicitous and charismatic phone-answering-service operator Ella Peterson, a role Judy Holliday irradiated at the 1956 premiere with armor-piercing charm. Miss Prince, regrettably, has some twenty extra years and an equal number of extra pounds under her belt, which, however, is trifling compared with her slim spontaneity and slender charm. Looking like Angela Lansbury on a bad-hair day, she seems about as likely to fill the sullen and hostile riders on a New York subway with fraternal love as able to transform the Sahara into a botanical garden."
"Let us start with its main -- almost its only -- selling point: Liza Minnelli. I always thought Miss Minnelli's face deserving -- of first prize in the beagle category. Less aphoristically speaking, it is a face going off in three directions simultaneously: the nose always en route to becoming a trunk, blubber lips unable to resist the pull of gravity, and a chin trying its damnedest to withdraw into the neck, apparently trying to avoid responsibility for what goes on above it. It is, like any face, one that could be redeemed by genuine talent, but Miss Minnelli has only brashness, pathos and energy."
And after seeing Dame Diana Rigg in a particular play back in the 70s (in which she was nude at one point) "She is built like a brick mausoleum with insufficient flying buttresses."
"What a story........ everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." -- Birdie
[http://margochanning.broadwayworld.com/]
"The Devil Be Hittin' Me" -- Whitney
