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Arsenic and Old Lace

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Arsenic and Old Lace

By: Joseph Kesselring
Narrated by: Joseph Kent
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About this listen

An easy-going drama critic discovers that his kind and gentle aunts have a bizarre habit of poisoning gentlemen callers and burying them in the cellar.

Public Domain (P)2020 Eternal Classics Ancient, Classical & Medieval Literature Drama United States World Literature
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First off, what this is not: It's not a script or screenplay of the 1943 Capra movie of the same name. What it is: This is a reading of the complete text of the acting edition of the play (intended for theater productions) as originally published in 1944. There is no music nor any sound effects save for one knock on a door in the last act. There are references and jokes which would have been meaningful to a 1940s Broadway audience but which will be puzzling to people today. There are ethnic stereotypes that wouldn't get past Standards & Practices nowadays. It's a product of its own time in other words. However as someone who's worked the lighting and sound for and directed (EFL student) productions of this play, the recording has great personal and sentimental value for me and probably for anyone else in a similar position but that's the extent of it. The narrator (or his producer) completely misses or ignores the point that the play is set in 1940s New York--and in Brooklyn no less. That calls for Mid-Atlantic accents for the more educated of the characters and vaguely Brooklyn/2nd-generation immigrant accents for the rest with maybe a Midwestern or two. What we get instead is a pastiche of dubiously "Southern" accents that wander and stagger all over the landscape from Baltimore to New Orleans and everywhere between, often in the same utterance. If things like that bother you, stay away from this reading. But if you're looking for a passable reading of a comedy classic, this flawed effort will have to do until something better comes along.

Flawed but passable reading

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