Mr. Butz, who won a Tony Award for his portrayal of the grifter Freddy Benson in "Scoundrels," at the Imperial Theater, said: "To do this show is nothing less than a dream.
And, as in the sixties, the political atmosphere is ripe for film journalism: public life is awash in scoundrels, liars, and deluded ideologues; all over the world, cultural conflict is playing out on the streets.
Under Mr. Winship's leadership and with the backing of the Taylor family that owned the newspaper, The Globe won 12 Pulitzer Prizes and produced heartburn in scoundrels locally and beyond.
But, as Noël Coward said in "The Scoundrel," I hate stooping to symbolism.
There's something ancient and real about it, and in a scoundrel's sort of way there's something honest, too.
As Mount Etna erupts in the background (the scene is in Sicily), the scoundrel ends up crushed in the embrace of the statue of Alice Manfredi, a 16-year-old Florentine he seduced and abandoned a decade before the curtain rises.
Whether down Mexico way or in Morocco, it generally kept the atmospheric extras — the snake-hipped dancing girl, the scoundrel in the burnoose, the smiler in the fez — stashed in the background, where they wouldn't distract from the star attractions.
But these demarcations turn out to be entirely arbitrary with respect to the protagonist, aside from giving him the opportunity to engage in periodic ritual grumbling about the scoundrel in question.
Mr. Koch coupled his support of Mr. Turner with a denunciation of Republican leaders in Washington as "scoundrels" in the struggle over the federal debt ceiling.
