Fine and Tandy, or There's No Place Like Hume
The honorees for this 1986 Kennedy Center Honor are one of the great acting couples in American theater history, Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy. She might be the better-known of the two today for her Oscar-winning role in Driving Miss Daisy, but together and separately, they’ve had deeply admired careers. This opens with a wonderful speech by Glenn Close (who, in her first film, played their daughter in The World According to Garp), followed by a terrific film biography, highlighted for me by a scene together from the movie Cocoon. The Kennedy Center Honors always seems to somewhat understandably have more of a difficult time putting on a big gala presentation for actors, but the efforts here are thoroughly entertaining with Sigourney Weaver and guest performers Jose Ferrer, Liv Ullman, Rosemary Harris and playwright Edward Albee giving some
moving and often very funny readings – and then followed by a thoroughly entertaining and spot-on appropriate musical performance well-worth waiting for – of which I shall say no more (if only to make it a little treat to look forward to), other than it’s a medley from the musical I Do! I Do!, that is based on the play The Fourposter that Cronyn and Tandy had originated on stage, a two-person play about a 54-year marriage.
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